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.
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.