Leave stuff like ratios of reproductive sex alone; I don’t think this is a direct obstacle to something people’d recognize as a utopia.
Divide the Earth up by ecoregions. Extensive surveys of natural resources, landforms, biomes, economically-significant species, ecosystem-provided services, existing human use and infrastructure, so on. “Urban” counts as a biome here.
Priority technologies to research, develop and deploy as universally-accessible things:
-Passive or solar-charged night-vision glasses. This is to reduce the need for artificial electric lighting at night; its creation was a real game-changer, but the energy consumption is extreme.
-A reversible, safe, efficient oral contraceptive for folks with danglybits. This is to be paired with widespread distribution of existing birth-control methods.
-Dump tons of money into research for efficient hydrogen-fuelled and electric transport; also kick off a nuclear renaissance with an emphasis on modern design and organizing/management principles without the neglect incentives currently possessed by private industrial NPOs. Expand supplemental renewables production. Every continent gets an elevated high-speed rail network.
Relocalize culture. Start with food. Create new or revived forms of cuisine and food culture that are specific to an area; identify candidate wild foods and likely yields, promote them vigorously, and incorporate them into the diet; initially as supplemental or occasional foods, but with an eye towards transition to primarily-local resources. This model is not even vaguely allergic to agriculture, but it is focused on providing food for local people in a sustainable manner rather than engaging in high-volume agricultural trade. Over-bred domestic animal stocks designed for factory-farming will be phased out. More robust, mixed-trait varietals will be emphasized, as will best practices for handling (some of Temple Grandin’s work is useful to this idea). Wild stock in general will be promoted, though the development of sustainable populations and management programs for harvesting may take a bit. One sort of long-distance agribusiness trade that may be a good idea is crops and livestock from similar biomes, in an effort to maximize productivity. Focus on more microlivestock as well, up to and including bugs. Then take all of it and that have each bioregion figure out a pretty good diet that balances nutrient needs and caloric abundance during the critical phases of childhood, design a local cuisine, and go.
Some areas simply won’t be compatible with settled habitation, even after all that. So create some technologies to facilitate a sort of moden nomadism—the modern Inuit would probably be a lot better off if, like their ancestors, they were legally allowed to do mobile living with the kids and, as a consequence, get a diet rich in organ meats from local wildlife. Portable, clean electric generators, high-end durable vehicles of appropriate sorts, long-range communication technologies for areas off the beaten path, ubiquitous first-aid kits and training—emphasis of state services in such areas should be on medical and emergency fast-response. Other important stuff: Rural communications and education.
Economics: Automate the hell out of whatever is amenable to having the hell automated out of it and still capable of producing a decent product. We don’t get nanotech, but 3D printing is fair game—subsidize it for startups.
I’m still chewing on to what degree the actual ownership vs management structures look like here, and have been writing this since I woke up. Will come back and poke it more in a bit...
EDIT: S’more thoughts on economics:
I’m envisioning a lot of production being done in a massively-automated fashion enabled by dedicated, highly-trained staff, who work for...well, call them concerns. They’re kinda hard for me to pin down as purely state or private. It seems like a lot of frameworks could fit in here—Jamais Cascio’s “Robonomics” scenario, in which private companies who pay a flat income tax and obey regulatory restrictions but no payroll taxes could probably be slotted in as readily as an idealized “the state owns the means, cooperatives license them” sorta Marxist-like scenario. However you want to construct it, the goal is “productive economy to enable a measure of global trade and undergird a social support system”—basically, I want to see free medical care (in terms of the end-user’s experience of it), a basic income guaruntee, and support for other things that may not be immediately profitable in and of themselves but produce significant social value.
I’ve thought in a lot of situations about a two-tiered currency system: essentially, basic income guarantee, necessities, most manufactured goods and social services are payed for with one kind of currency; bespoke items, luxury goods, non-necessities and so on are payed for with another. Basically representing automated versus direct human labor.
Law enforcement: I don’t see it disappearing given the constraints here, alas. Some remedies off the top of my head include an emphasis on beat cops who patrol their own living areas, and neighborhood police booths like in Japan (remove the social distance); backup in the form of general support for an area, but ultimately answerable to the local side of things. This is coupled with eliminating victimless crimes (drugs and sex work are immediate examples), and a prison system that looks a lot more like Norway’s rehabilitation approach to things.
Ecology: no single unifying strategy here, but I don’t think we have to consume everything; moreover, it’s ecologically and economically beneficial not to. Rewildingisgoodforsome areas and ecosystems, but sometimesweimproveonthem.
The net picture looks sorta like this, at least in my head:
-People are born into relatively healthy, prosperous communities that have no explicit need to travel, but travel is easy and affordable. Work is not the same thing as employment; the choice between starvation and an exploitative economic arrangement is absent. Basic needs are meet. Personal and cultural autonomy are both significant. Most people have enjoyable lives; people who don’t fit where they are have some ability to get out of there and find a niche that suits them better. The economy chugs along pretty steadily most of the time, with few fantastic booms but few real crises. But it’s not stagnant either—this is a terrific climate for science and intellectual inquiry, as free time abounds for many and there is not so much pressure to choose between that and starving to death. People who like it competitive are free to try and get into a concern, but work and employment are not synonyms—lots of people do socially-useful work without being employed. People who just don’t like other people and want to bog off into the wilderness or something and rough it can do that—and if they decide to come back later society is still there for them. There’s still incentive to find something socially-, commercially- or academically-relevant to people because human labor is incentivized seperately from the production that drives the core economy; even if you just write poetry, someone might conceivably pay you a few human-dollars now and again for it—human labor currency can sometimes behave like a reputation economy.
Less harm, less disutiility, higher average wellbeing, a rich and stimulating life for most people, good health, less basis for direct conflict...
(Oh, I can see issues. What about climate change? Reorganizing ecoregions is bound to upset more than a few applecarts—it’s very well and good to talk about a Northern Forager-styled society in the Great Lakes area, but what happens when winters become warm enough that maple syrup can’t be produced? What kind of economic and social shakedowns result? This definitely needs to be explored in more depth than I can managed right now...)
Your first point makes me realize that gene therapy or something of the sort for cat-level night vision would be really cool.
I’m not very sure that the reason we have industrial concentrated agriculture is lack of the right plants and knowledge of how to make them tasty. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why agriculture is as spacially concentrated as it is. Knowledge of how to grow particular plants in a particular climate? (in which case you’re right) Infrastructure? Water and terrain?
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.
I’m not very sure that the reason we have industrial concentrated agriculture is lack of the right plants and knowledge of how to make them tasty.
Kind of missing my point, though my point is sorta nested under layers of assumptions in that particular case. Lemme take you through it.
I live in a cold climate with extreme seasonal variation. Winters here are very harsh. But I can buy bananas at the grocery store whenever I want, anytime. (This is for really weird, complex historical and geopolitical reasons that I’m prone to rambling about in their own right, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
And that’s good, if you think about it, because there’s very little fruit here that grows under agricultural conditions, let alone wild ones. Oh, there’s been progress made in cold-climate cultivars of apple, pear and a few other things here, but those are all very recent developments. Forget citrus, forget bananas. If you want your vitamins, you need fruits and veggies (or organ meats, but those are not a common element of the mainstream diet here). However, the climate is wholly unsuited to producing them for most of the year, and we have a short growing season even when it happens.
Under the current system, we mostly grow corn and soy, and sell it to people far away. That’s economically productive, but it takes a lot of land. It also depends on a huge, massive global trade network reliant on just-in-time delivery and a consume, consume, consume mindset in the relevant trade partners and their cultural substrate. That particular thing is what I see as part of the problem that needs solving—not trade itself, not even long-distance trade; those are good things—just the relevant complex of players, relationships and motives and its direct and external effects on much of what I value.
My priorities are roughly as follows:
-Increase resilience (failures of the just-in-time delivery system are disastrous; monocultures are fragile) and sustainability -Enrich local cultures and make them more fun and interesting, and more distinctive. -Encourage diverse, robust and complex polycultures with narrower peaks and valleys over just-good-enough monocultures that either boom or bust. -Make it so that the majority of local inhabitants of a region can have a life worth living where they’re at, regardless of available opportunities to leave and explore or settle someplace else.
That suggests to me that the current approach to food production in my home area is not gonna fly under the system I’m thinking of. The problem is that climate is a serious impediment to alternatives. Not an absolute barrier—there have been a lot of human beings living here since long before the settlers arrived, in conditions of relative abundance even—but still a significant one given the current population. Basically, land use patterns gotta shift, and for that to really work out okay in a place that spends most of the year agriculturally fallow, we need a more varied diet that makes better use of local and seasonal resources and doesn’t share the mainstream culture’s resistance, aversion or neglect toward certain types of food.
What I have in mind is something like permaculture food forests, supplemented with lower-key, locally-focused agriculture and greenhouses, as well as sustainable harvest of wild resources. A bit of farming, a bit of foraging, a bit of high-tech, a bit of permaculture. I envision the results looking a bit like this: http://troutcaviar.blogspot.com/
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.
This model is not even vaguely allergic to agriculture, but it is focused on providing food for local people in a sustainable manner rather than engaging in high-volume agricultural trade.
Localizing agriculture would be quite expensive in terms of resources, as would phasing out existing engineered varieties. I’d focus on removing current farm subsidies, which tend to overly promote factory-style agribusiness, and plow more resources into preserving existing varieties of crops and livestock. Other than that, though, I don’t think changes are warranted.
Localizing agriculture would be quite expensive in terms of resources, as would phasing out existing engineered varieties.
Terms of the thought experiment: I get to wave my hands and change society to look like something else, absent trasnhumanist technological favorites. If it’s expensive, it’s okay in this situation to assume that the investment is made anyway.
Wow, thanks for sharing that much time to think about it!
Many ideas there I’ve never had heard of, as someone who likes to write utopias quite a bit, I enjoyed my reading time.
Leave stuff like ratios of reproductive sex alone; I don’t think this is a direct obstacle to something people’d recognize as a utopia.
Divide the Earth up by ecoregions. Extensive surveys of natural resources, landforms, biomes, economically-significant species, ecosystem-provided services, existing human use and infrastructure, so on. “Urban” counts as a biome here.
Priority technologies to research, develop and deploy as universally-accessible things:
-Passive or solar-charged night-vision glasses. This is to reduce the need for artificial electric lighting at night; its creation was a real game-changer, but the energy consumption is extreme.
-A reversible, safe, efficient oral contraceptive for folks with danglybits. This is to be paired with widespread distribution of existing birth-control methods.
-Dump tons of money into research for efficient hydrogen-fuelled and electric transport; also kick off a nuclear renaissance with an emphasis on modern design and organizing/management principles without the neglect incentives currently possessed by private industrial NPOs. Expand supplemental renewables production. Every continent gets an elevated high-speed rail network.
Relocalize culture. Start with food. Create new or revived forms of cuisine and food culture that are specific to an area; identify candidate wild foods and likely yields, promote them vigorously, and incorporate them into the diet; initially as supplemental or occasional foods, but with an eye towards transition to primarily-local resources. This model is not even vaguely allergic to agriculture, but it is focused on providing food for local people in a sustainable manner rather than engaging in high-volume agricultural trade. Over-bred domestic animal stocks designed for factory-farming will be phased out. More robust, mixed-trait varietals will be emphasized, as will best practices for handling (some of Temple Grandin’s work is useful to this idea). Wild stock in general will be promoted, though the development of sustainable populations and management programs for harvesting may take a bit. One sort of long-distance agribusiness trade that may be a good idea is crops and livestock from similar biomes, in an effort to maximize productivity. Focus on more microlivestock as well, up to and including bugs. Then take all of it and that have each bioregion figure out a pretty good diet that balances nutrient needs and caloric abundance during the critical phases of childhood, design a local cuisine, and go.
Some areas simply won’t be compatible with settled habitation, even after all that. So create some technologies to facilitate a sort of moden nomadism—the modern Inuit would probably be a lot better off if, like their ancestors, they were legally allowed to do mobile living with the kids and, as a consequence, get a diet rich in organ meats from local wildlife. Portable, clean electric generators, high-end durable vehicles of appropriate sorts, long-range communication technologies for areas off the beaten path, ubiquitous first-aid kits and training—emphasis of state services in such areas should be on medical and emergency fast-response. Other important stuff: Rural communications and education.
Economics: Automate the hell out of whatever is amenable to having the hell automated out of it and still capable of producing a decent product. We don’t get nanotech, but 3D printing is fair game—subsidize it for startups.
I’m still chewing on to what degree the actual ownership vs management structures look like here, and have been writing this since I woke up. Will come back and poke it more in a bit...
EDIT: S’more thoughts on economics:
I’m envisioning a lot of production being done in a massively-automated fashion enabled by dedicated, highly-trained staff, who work for...well, call them concerns. They’re kinda hard for me to pin down as purely state or private. It seems like a lot of frameworks could fit in here—Jamais Cascio’s “Robonomics” scenario, in which private companies who pay a flat income tax and obey regulatory restrictions but no payroll taxes could probably be slotted in as readily as an idealized “the state owns the means, cooperatives license them” sorta Marxist-like scenario. However you want to construct it, the goal is “productive economy to enable a measure of global trade and undergird a social support system”—basically, I want to see free medical care (in terms of the end-user’s experience of it), a basic income guaruntee, and support for other things that may not be immediately profitable in and of themselves but produce significant social value.
I’ve thought in a lot of situations about a two-tiered currency system: essentially, basic income guarantee, necessities, most manufactured goods and social services are payed for with one kind of currency; bespoke items, luxury goods, non-necessities and so on are payed for with another. Basically representing automated versus direct human labor.
Law enforcement: I don’t see it disappearing given the constraints here, alas. Some remedies off the top of my head include an emphasis on beat cops who patrol their own living areas, and neighborhood police booths like in Japan (remove the social distance); backup in the form of general support for an area, but ultimately answerable to the local side of things. This is coupled with eliminating victimless crimes (drugs and sex work are immediate examples), and a prison system that looks a lot more like Norway’s rehabilitation approach to things.
Ecology: no single unifying strategy here, but I don’t think we have to consume everything; moreover, it’s ecologically and economically beneficial not to. Rewilding is good for some areas and ecosystems, but sometimes we improve on them.
The net picture looks sorta like this, at least in my head:
-People are born into relatively healthy, prosperous communities that have no explicit need to travel, but travel is easy and affordable. Work is not the same thing as employment; the choice between starvation and an exploitative economic arrangement is absent. Basic needs are meet. Personal and cultural autonomy are both significant. Most people have enjoyable lives; people who don’t fit where they are have some ability to get out of there and find a niche that suits them better. The economy chugs along pretty steadily most of the time, with few fantastic booms but few real crises. But it’s not stagnant either—this is a terrific climate for science and intellectual inquiry, as free time abounds for many and there is not so much pressure to choose between that and starving to death. People who like it competitive are free to try and get into a concern, but work and employment are not synonyms—lots of people do socially-useful work without being employed. People who just don’t like other people and want to bog off into the wilderness or something and rough it can do that—and if they decide to come back later society is still there for them. There’s still incentive to find something socially-, commercially- or academically-relevant to people because human labor is incentivized seperately from the production that drives the core economy; even if you just write poetry, someone might conceivably pay you a few human-dollars now and again for it—human labor currency can sometimes behave like a reputation economy.
Less harm, less disutiility, higher average wellbeing, a rich and stimulating life for most people, good health, less basis for direct conflict...
(Oh, I can see issues. What about climate change? Reorganizing ecoregions is bound to upset more than a few applecarts—it’s very well and good to talk about a Northern Forager-styled society in the Great Lakes area, but what happens when winters become warm enough that maple syrup can’t be produced? What kind of economic and social shakedowns result? This definitely needs to be explored in more depth than I can managed right now...)
Your first point makes me realize that gene therapy or something of the sort for cat-level night vision would be really cool.
I’m not very sure that the reason we have industrial concentrated agriculture is lack of the right plants and knowledge of how to make them tasty. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why agriculture is as spacially concentrated as it is. Knowledge of how to grow particular plants in a particular climate? (in which case you’re right) Infrastructure? Water and terrain?
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.
Kind of missing my point, though my point is sorta nested under layers of assumptions in that particular case. Lemme take you through it.
I live in a cold climate with extreme seasonal variation. Winters here are very harsh. But I can buy bananas at the grocery store whenever I want, anytime. (This is for really weird, complex historical and geopolitical reasons that I’m prone to rambling about in their own right, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
And that’s good, if you think about it, because there’s very little fruit here that grows under agricultural conditions, let alone wild ones. Oh, there’s been progress made in cold-climate cultivars of apple, pear and a few other things here, but those are all very recent developments. Forget citrus, forget bananas. If you want your vitamins, you need fruits and veggies (or organ meats, but those are not a common element of the mainstream diet here). However, the climate is wholly unsuited to producing them for most of the year, and we have a short growing season even when it happens.
Under the current system, we mostly grow corn and soy, and sell it to people far away. That’s economically productive, but it takes a lot of land. It also depends on a huge, massive global trade network reliant on just-in-time delivery and a consume, consume, consume mindset in the relevant trade partners and their cultural substrate. That particular thing is what I see as part of the problem that needs solving—not trade itself, not even long-distance trade; those are good things—just the relevant complex of players, relationships and motives and its direct and external effects on much of what I value.
My priorities are roughly as follows:
-Increase resilience (failures of the just-in-time delivery system are disastrous; monocultures are fragile) and sustainability
-Enrich local cultures and make them more fun and interesting, and more distinctive.
-Encourage diverse, robust and complex polycultures with narrower peaks and valleys over just-good-enough monocultures that either boom or bust.
-Make it so that the majority of local inhabitants of a region can have a life worth living where they’re at, regardless of available opportunities to leave and explore or settle someplace else.
That suggests to me that the current approach to food production in my home area is not gonna fly under the system I’m thinking of. The problem is that climate is a serious impediment to alternatives. Not an absolute barrier—there have been a lot of human beings living here since long before the settlers arrived, in conditions of relative abundance even—but still a significant one given the current population. Basically, land use patterns gotta shift, and for that to really work out okay in a place that spends most of the year agriculturally fallow, we need a more varied diet that makes better use of local and seasonal resources and doesn’t share the mainstream culture’s resistance, aversion or neglect toward certain types of food.
What I have in mind is something like permaculture food forests, supplemented with lower-key, locally-focused agriculture and greenhouses, as well as sustainable harvest of wild resources. A bit of farming, a bit of foraging, a bit of high-tech, a bit of permaculture. I envision the results looking a bit like this: http://troutcaviar.blogspot.com/
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.
Localizing agriculture would be quite expensive in terms of resources, as would phasing out existing engineered varieties. I’d focus on removing current farm subsidies, which tend to overly promote factory-style agribusiness, and plow more resources into preserving existing varieties of crops and livestock. Other than that, though, I don’t think changes are warranted.
Terms of the thought experiment: I get to wave my hands and change society to look like something else, absent trasnhumanist technological favorites. If it’s expensive, it’s okay in this situation to assume that the investment is made anyway.
Wow, thanks for sharing that much time to think about it! Many ideas there I’ve never had heard of, as someone who likes to write utopias quite a bit, I enjoyed my reading time.