I love it when someone asks the community for creative ideas. They’re always interesting.
Without the possibility of technologic advancement, I don’t really feel that utopia is a worthwhile goal. Every version just feels like stagnation, which bothers me. I don’t see much point in life if everything’s all planned out.
And any plan we could propose would eventually fall out of fashion unless measures were taken to prevent societal change. Some configurations are more preferable than others, sure, but in the end the deal is radical, unprecedented change, cyclical rise and fall of civilizations, or stasis. The last is boring, the middle is boring but commonly accepted, and the last is scary. Take out the scary and you have boring and more boring.
If we’re going for stasis, I vote for some kind of enforced anarchy or nuking the world. Those are at least somewhat interesting.
“Utopia” is in the title and specifies stasis. Any plan specifies stasis on some level because you can’t plan unending change.
If the configuration of society is isolated as the only element of importance, and you have full control over the configuration of society, and you need to give an acceptable solution to the configuration of society, you get stasis in the configuration of society or there’s no point.
You’re bringing a lot of assumptions to the table. Basically every statement you made just now was not included in the OP.
You can design a system to be flexible and resilient in the face of inevitable change, without actually planning the change itself. Will that work? Well, probably not, just as most static utopias probably won’t work.
You can also plan/allow for change that isn’t about the configuration of society (nowhere was it implied at all that configuration of society was the only variable you cared about. The only stipulation was that manipulation of biology, nanotech, etc, were the only variables you couldn’t mess with).
Well that’s silly. If I can manipulate everything except the human condition and technology, then I can create such an extreme surplus of resources that all the problems not directly related to technology or the configuration of society just disappear. If you take away tech advancement, that just leaves the configuration of society. Plus, I thought he was pretty clear at first that we were supposed to be looking for sociological solutions to the problem.
And you just agreed that any plan that we come up with will fade with time and become irrelevant. I still say that either we advance in some way, or considering the system on a societal level is not worth it.
I love it when someone asks the community for creative ideas. They’re always interesting.
Without the possibility of technologic advancement, I don’t really feel that utopia is a worthwhile goal. Every version just feels like stagnation, which bothers me. I don’t see much point in life if everything’s all planned out.
And any plan we could propose would eventually fall out of fashion unless measures were taken to prevent societal change. Some configurations are more preferable than others, sure, but in the end the deal is radical, unprecedented change, cyclical rise and fall of civilizations, or stasis. The last is boring, the middle is boring but commonly accepted, and the last is scary. Take out the scary and you have boring and more boring.
If we’re going for stasis, I vote for some kind of enforced anarchy or nuking the world. Those are at least somewhat interesting.
He didn’t specify stasis.
“Utopia” is in the title and specifies stasis. Any plan specifies stasis on some level because you can’t plan unending change.
If the configuration of society is isolated as the only element of importance, and you have full control over the configuration of society, and you need to give an acceptable solution to the configuration of society, you get stasis in the configuration of society or there’s no point.
You’re bringing a lot of assumptions to the table. Basically every statement you made just now was not included in the OP.
You can design a system to be flexible and resilient in the face of inevitable change, without actually planning the change itself. Will that work? Well, probably not, just as most static utopias probably won’t work.
You can also plan/allow for change that isn’t about the configuration of society (nowhere was it implied at all that configuration of society was the only variable you cared about. The only stipulation was that manipulation of biology, nanotech, etc, were the only variables you couldn’t mess with).
Well that’s silly. If I can manipulate everything except the human condition and technology, then I can create such an extreme surplus of resources that all the problems not directly related to technology or the configuration of society just disappear. If you take away tech advancement, that just leaves the configuration of society. Plus, I thought he was pretty clear at first that we were supposed to be looking for sociological solutions to the problem.
And you just agreed that any plan that we come up with will fade with time and become irrelevant. I still say that either we advance in some way, or considering the system on a societal level is not worth it.