HERE ARE THE CONSTRAINTS: Assume for the time being that it will forever remain beyond the scope of science to change Human Nature. AGI is also impossible, as is Nanotech, BioImmortality, and those things.
Your first point makes me realize that gene therapy or something of the sort for cat-level night vision would be really cool.
Wouldn’t it? I think it’s proscribed by the terms of the thought experiment, but if it weren’t I’d include an option to subsidize the creation of a working tapetum lucidum in whoever wants one.
Biological tinkering, so long as it doesn’t make changes in the range of human temperament or huge changes in longevity would seem to be permitted. I think we’re stuck with the usual amount of status seeking, cruelty, violence, and inertia, though those vary quite a bit from one time and place to another. I don’t know what the best we could get would be just using ordinary cultural methods.
Some increase of lifespan—say to 150 years with a fairly short unhealthy bit at the end—would also seem to be within the challenge.
Your description of more varied and resilient agriculture so that food doesn’t need to be hauled as far seems doable. I’m not sure if it needs much cheaper energy to keep the greenhouses warm and lit or much more expensive energy so that people will have an incentive to develop local food.
I’ve wondered whether good local lives would require a good bit of telecommuting. Rural poverty seems (to my casual knowledge) to be very intractable—that’s part of why poor people move from farms to cities. On the other hand, the problem may be more political than I realize.
Rural poverty seems (to my casual knowledge) to be very intractable—that’s part of why poor people move from farms to cities. On the other hand, the problem may be more political than I realize.
I’m definitely not an expert in this sort of sociology, but I have lived in rural areas for a good chunk of my life and I’m familiar with a variety of ways of living under those constraints. The impression I get is that rural poverty is largely due to infrastructure and availability issues, and to lack of economies of scale.
Ten miles outside my hometown there’s still electricity and good roads, and the people making their living there (as opposed to people that prefer rural life but work in town) tend to be fairly affluent ranchers and vintners or their lower-middle-class employees. Twenty miles outside town there’s no central electricity let alone water, the roads are dirt tracks or poorly maintained asphalt and don’t get plowed in the winter, and about the only commercial enterprises worth talking about are forestry and a couple of mines. The few people living permanently under those conditions are truly poor. Not because of lack of marketable skills—I spent one summer staying with a family friend who lived in a one-room log cabin, and he was one of the more gifted mechanics I’ve met—but because lack of infrastructure makes labor-saving measures a lot harder and more expensive, and because low population density makes niches for comparative advantage a lot rarer and shallower.
These problems strike me as technical more than political, and I’m not aware of any candidate technical solutions that’d level them completely. But there are some technical advances that’d mitigate them considerably. Affordable and reliable wind and solar would make labor-saving technology less dependent on the power grid and would enable network connectivity; network connectivity allows some knowledge work to be done rurally, makes education a lot easier, and makes distribution of goods simpler (you still have to ship out production, but payment, marketing, and some support can be done digitally). If we’re really interested in tackling rural poverty as a political issue, any of this could be subsidized, although that doesn’t strike me as a great utilitarian move given the greater efficiency of urbanized settlement.
Biological tinkering, so long as it doesn’t make changes in the range of human temperament or huge changes in longevity would seem to be permitted.
I’d consider that to be almost definitionally transformative; on the other hand, that moves the window for “transformative” into serious overlap with a lot of contemporary tech, so I suppose it’s a matter of taste.
I think we’re stuck with the usual amount of status seeking, cruelty, violence, and inertia, though those vary quite a bit from one time and place to another.
Oh, they vary amazingly alright. In my ideal case, status-seeking has plenty of safe outlets, but the prevailing cultural norm (insofar as we want any of those to extend to a huge portion of the population) also looks a lot less competitive than is normal in Western culture. I’d like to remove incentives for all but the most banal forms of cruelty (probably no force on Earth can prevent human children from picking on each other, but what does that look like, and how does it play out in terms of long-term social relations between folks?), but there’ll always be someone who tortures squirrels to death for fun or just has a bit of a sadistic streak around other humans. Violence is trickier—my goal is to remove much of the incentive for large-scale violence, and create some ways of mitigating the smaller-scale power of violence to do harm.
Some increase of lifespan—say to 150 years with a fairly short unhealthy bit at the end—would also seem to be within the challenge.
I’m not so sure about that—we don’t have any good sense that 150 years is even a plausible lifespan for an unmodified human, and the Gompertz function is hard at work through the centenarian mark. Humans join elephants and a few other mammals in having remarkably long lifespans for our body weight; I suspect we’re pretty near to what is plausible, barring some kind of really weird, exceptional circumstance. (I suppose now, when there are more human beings than ever, we have the best chance yet of someone living to a record-shattering old age, but I’d still be surprised if 150 was achievable...)
I’m not sure if it needs much cheaper energy to keep the greenhouses warm and lit
Depends where you are, of course—greenhouses probably can’t be made economical in Nunavut, but they’re already viable in parts of southern Canada.
Rural poverty is complicated—I think it does have political dimensions, but a lot of that comes down to cities as economic engines and rural areas as being primarily harvest-zones when in the past they were more just places most people lived.
The Navajo are probably better off in the long run without uranium mining on their lands, but the existing structure of things makes it needful for rural folks to have income in the same sense that folks in the city do, with many fewer opportunities for it, and less bargaining power. Same holds true in much of Appalachia—many folks there don’t like the coal mines, but need jobs, and get to watch their own communities pay the cost in environmental externalities.
One thing that occurs to me is that for rural-urban interfacing, this two-tiered currency idea (machine vs human labor) suggests that rural folks might wind up doing well—when human labor is a much more important part of the local economy, payment is in human dollars, which are fungible for fancier and more-desireable stuff.
HERE ARE THE CONSTRAINTS: Assume for the time being that it will forever remain beyond the scope of science to change Human Nature. AGI is also impossible, as is Nanotech, BioImmortality, and those things.
Biological tinkering, so long as it doesn’t make changes in the range of human temperament or huge changes in longevity would seem to be permitted. I think we’re stuck with the usual amount of status seeking, cruelty, violence, and inertia, though those vary quite a bit from one time and place to another. I don’t know what the best we could get would be just using ordinary cultural methods.
Some increase of lifespan—say to 150 years with a fairly short unhealthy bit at the end—would also seem to be within the challenge.
Your description of more varied and resilient agriculture so that food doesn’t need to be hauled as far seems doable. I’m not sure if it needs much cheaper energy to keep the greenhouses warm and lit or much more expensive energy so that people will have an incentive to develop local food.
I’ve wondered whether good local lives would require a good bit of telecommuting. Rural poverty seems (to my casual knowledge) to be very intractable—that’s part of why poor people move from farms to cities. On the other hand, the problem may be more political than I realize.
I’m definitely not an expert in this sort of sociology, but I have lived in rural areas for a good chunk of my life and I’m familiar with a variety of ways of living under those constraints. The impression I get is that rural poverty is largely due to infrastructure and availability issues, and to lack of economies of scale.
Ten miles outside my hometown there’s still electricity and good roads, and the people making their living there (as opposed to people that prefer rural life but work in town) tend to be fairly affluent ranchers and vintners or their lower-middle-class employees. Twenty miles outside town there’s no central electricity let alone water, the roads are dirt tracks or poorly maintained asphalt and don’t get plowed in the winter, and about the only commercial enterprises worth talking about are forestry and a couple of mines. The few people living permanently under those conditions are truly poor. Not because of lack of marketable skills—I spent one summer staying with a family friend who lived in a one-room log cabin, and he was one of the more gifted mechanics I’ve met—but because lack of infrastructure makes labor-saving measures a lot harder and more expensive, and because low population density makes niches for comparative advantage a lot rarer and shallower.
These problems strike me as technical more than political, and I’m not aware of any candidate technical solutions that’d level them completely. But there are some technical advances that’d mitigate them considerably. Affordable and reliable wind and solar would make labor-saving technology less dependent on the power grid and would enable network connectivity; network connectivity allows some knowledge work to be done rurally, makes education a lot easier, and makes distribution of goods simpler (you still have to ship out production, but payment, marketing, and some support can be done digitally). If we’re really interested in tackling rural poverty as a political issue, any of this could be subsidized, although that doesn’t strike me as a great utilitarian move given the greater efficiency of urbanized settlement.
I’d consider that to be almost definitionally transformative; on the other hand, that moves the window for “transformative” into serious overlap with a lot of contemporary tech, so I suppose it’s a matter of taste.
Oh, they vary amazingly alright. In my ideal case, status-seeking has plenty of safe outlets, but the prevailing cultural norm (insofar as we want any of those to extend to a huge portion of the population) also looks a lot less competitive than is normal in Western culture. I’d like to remove incentives for all but the most banal forms of cruelty (probably no force on Earth can prevent human children from picking on each other, but what does that look like, and how does it play out in terms of long-term social relations between folks?), but there’ll always be someone who tortures squirrels to death for fun or just has a bit of a sadistic streak around other humans. Violence is trickier—my goal is to remove much of the incentive for large-scale violence, and create some ways of mitigating the smaller-scale power of violence to do harm.
I’m not so sure about that—we don’t have any good sense that 150 years is even a plausible lifespan for an unmodified human, and the Gompertz function is hard at work through the centenarian mark. Humans join elephants and a few other mammals in having remarkably long lifespans for our body weight; I suspect we’re pretty near to what is plausible, barring some kind of really weird, exceptional circumstance. (I suppose now, when there are more human beings than ever, we have the best chance yet of someone living to a record-shattering old age, but I’d still be surprised if 150 was achievable...)
Depends where you are, of course—greenhouses probably can’t be made economical in Nunavut, but they’re already viable in parts of southern Canada.
Rural poverty is complicated—I think it does have political dimensions, but a lot of that comes down to cities as economic engines and rural areas as being primarily harvest-zones when in the past they were more just places most people lived.
The Navajo are probably better off in the long run without uranium mining on their lands, but the existing structure of things makes it needful for rural folks to have income in the same sense that folks in the city do, with many fewer opportunities for it, and less bargaining power. Same holds true in much of Appalachia—many folks there don’t like the coal mines, but need jobs, and get to watch their own communities pay the cost in environmental externalities.
One thing that occurs to me is that for rural-urban interfacing, this two-tiered currency idea (machine vs human labor) suggests that rural folks might wind up doing well—when human labor is a much more important part of the local economy, payment is in human dollars, which are fungible for fancier and more-desireable stuff.