Your question implies you think that the main complaints in the developed world involve decent drinks on planes and similarly non-dire concerns. Not sure I agree with that implication.
“I’m concerned about nuclear war. It’s like the wars you know, but it’s a lot more deadly and whole areas can be left uninhabitable for centuries.”
“I’m concerned about dying of cancer. Cancer is a disease that many people eventually get once we have reduced the rate of dying from other things.”
“I’m concerned about the NSA reading my email. You don’t have email 200 years ago, but surely you understand how bad it is for the government to spy on people. Imagine that every time you wrote someone a letter, the government hired a scribe to copy it and filed it so they could read it whenever they wanted.”
The first and last problem on your list aren’t related to scarcity. As for the second one:
“I’m concerned about dying of cancer. Cancer is a disease that many people eventually get once we have reduced the rate of dying from other things.”
You left out the part where you get them to understand why this is dire. If you told them the life expectancy of the typical member of a developed country, they’re assume you were describing a utopian society.
I think that someone from 200 years ago would readily understand that people don’t want to die, and that having a longer life expectancy and dying is still not as good as not dying. Yes, there’s always the possibility that they may think that dying is good, but it isn’t, really; that’s just a sour grapes-type rationalization that we only make in the first place because death sucks.
I’d also point out that nuclear war and NSA spying only can happen in a developed society because it takes a lot of resources to do those things. 200 years ago we were simply incapable of making a nuclear weapon, and even if space aliens had dropped the plans for one in their lap, they wouldn’t be able to build one; it takes a huge infrastructure to make one that does indeed imply having overcome many scarcity limitations.
There’s a lot going on in the conversation right now.
I just want to note that you are having a conversation about a slightly different topic than what army1987 was talking about—I think Eugine_Nier is right that many of your examples are not about scarcity per se.
Eugine’s question is in the context of a larger conversation.
Indeed, and said larger conversation includes TimS expressing confusion about how the question relates to the rest of the conversation. That being the case it is an error to suggest (or imply) that the answers to the question are non-sequitur simply because Jiro answered the question rather than trying to use the question as a chance to support some scarcity related position or another.
I’m confused by why your comment got downvoted. Not only is it correct in the context that scarcity is what is under discussion, but the point that modern developed societies resemble what someone in the past would likely have considered a utopia should be uncontroversial. Long lifespans and good medical care is in one of the things mentioned in the original book “Utopia”. Other historical utopian literature has this aspect, as well as emphasizing education and low infant mortality. New Atlantis would be a prominent example.
I don’t understand your question. I’m not sure I even understand the relevance of your question to the topic of post-scarcity and what post-scarcity might be like.
It seems pretty easy to explain current serious problems to people from the far past or far future (I’m not sure which you mean). Drinks on airplanes is just not a serious problem—it might be hard to explain not serious problems to people from very different cultural contexts.
My point is that if one were to ask someone ~100-200 years ago to imagine a post-scarcity society they’d imagine something that resembles our current society, yet we don’t think of ourselves as post-scarcity. Similarly, I doubt the societies of ~100-200 years in the future will think of themselves as post-scarcity, even if they’d seem that way to us at first glance.
If I asked someone from 100-200 years ago to imagine a post-scarcity society, I’d expect them to say something like “you can have as much of ___ as you want”. Furthermore, I think they’d clearly understand the difference between “have more of it than we get now” and “have as much as we want”, whether it’s lifespan, food and shelter, or anything else. I don’t see why someone from that time period would think a “post-scarcity” society means a society that merely has less scarcity.
“Someone from the past would say our level of something is far beyond what they would have hoped for” doesn’t equate to “someone from the past would say that our level of something is post-scarcity”. Presuming they speak English and the meaning of the term “post-scarcity” can be explained to them, I don’t see why they would confuse the two.
I would expect a typical member of my society, given the prompt “A post-scarcity society is one where you can have as much of _ as you want” and instructions to fill in the blank, to offer things like “food”, “housing,” “consumer goods”, “entertainment,” “leisure”, “Internet access,” “health care”, etc.
Some of those I would not expect a typical member of my society’s 1813 ancestors to offer.
I would not expect a typical member of my society to offer things like “emotional nurturing,” “challenge,” “work that needs to be done,” “friendship,” “love”, “knowledge,” “years of life”, “knowledge”… but I would not be greatly surprised by those answers from any given individual. If I woke up from a coma N years from now and those answers were typical, I would conclude that society had changed significantly.
I would be surprised by answers like “suffering,” “the color blue”, “emptiness”, “corporeal existence,” “qualia”, “mortality.” If I woke up from a coma N years from now and those answers were typical, I would conclude that society had become something unrecognizable.
There’s a difference between “more than I thought I could get” and “as much as I want”, though.
Eugene seems to think that someone from the past would call our society post-scarcity because it provides more of some things than he hopes he would get, rather than as much as he could possibly want. I think that given the definition of a post-scarcity society as one where you can get as much of something as you want, someone from the past would not consider our society to be a post-scarcity society, since it’s very clear that some things—even things that he himself wants—are in limited supply.
There’s a difference between “more than I thought I could get” and “as much as I want”, though.
My point is that the concept of “post-scarcity” is meaningless. It only seems meaningful because our intuitions conflate the two, or rather the amount of something someone wants at any given time is just a little more than what he thinks he can get. Of course, once the amount he thinks he can get changes, the amount he wants will also change, but at the time the amount he wanted really was that small.
I would be surprised by answers like “suffering,” “the color blue”, “emptiness”, “corporeal existence,” “qualia”, “mortality.” If I woke up from a coma N years from now and those answers were typical, I would conclude that society had become something unrecognizable.
The “corporeal existence” one actually fits well with what future people may consider a scarce luxury.
Sure, I can imagine a future for which that’s true. Ditto suffering, mortality, and qualia. The others are a bit beyond my imagination, but I suspect if I sat down and worked at it for a while I could come up with something.
Sure, I can imagine a future for which that’s true. Ditto suffering, mortality, and qualia.
The difference is that those wishes have to be contrived and would be considered insane (or confused) by local standards. Corporeal existence is something that that people with current human values are likely to consider a luxury in plausible transhuman circumstances.
I can imagine a future in which the default mode of existence for most people is incorporeal (say, as uploads), and being downloaded into a physical body is a luxury. I can imagine a future in which the default mode of existence for most people lacks subjective experience (again, say, as uploads which mostly run “on autopilot,” somewhat like a trance state, perhaps because computing subjective experience is expensive relative to computing other behavior), and being run with subjective experience is a luxury. (I don’t presume p-zombiehood here; I expect there to be demonstrable differences between these states.)
Neither of those strike me as requiring insanity or confusion. Whether the corresponding scenarios are contrived or plausible I’m not prepared to argue; they don’t seem differentially one or the other to me, but I’ll accept other judgments. (If your grounds for believing them differentially contrived are articulable, I’m interested; you might convince me.)
Suffering and mortality, I’ll grant you, require me to essentially posit fashion, which can equally well (or poorly) justify anything.
I would not expect a typical member of my society to offer things like “emotional nurturing,” “challenge,” “work that needs to be done,” “friendship,” “love”, “knowledge,” “years of life”, “knowledge”...
Some of those answers would be far more common in certain past eras.
Just to be clear: do you expect that a typical respondent during the late 60′s-early 70′s, given the prompt “A post-scarcity society is one where you can have as much of _ as you want” and instructions to fill in the blank, would reply “love”?
I suspect that in 1813 there were people who worried about whether they would find themselves without enough food, shelter, medicine, or defense from hostile outsiders.
If I described to them the level of food, shelter, medicine, and defense that their counterparts in 2013 had available, I expect they would go “Wow! That’s amazing! Why, with that much abundance, I would never worry again!”
If I then explained to them how often their counterparts in 2013 worried about whether they find themselves without enough food, shelter, medicine, or defense from hostile outsiders, I would expect several reactions. One is incredulity. Another is some variant of “well, I guess some people are never satisfied.” A third is “Huh. Yeah, I guess ‘enough abundance’ is something we approach only asymptotically.”
If I explained to them the other stuff their counterparts in 2013 worried about , and how anxious they sometimes became about such things, I’d expect a similar range of reactions.
For my own part, I think ” ‘Enough abundance’ is something we approach only asymptotically.” is a pretty accurate summary.
So, sure. As we progress from “even wealthy people routinely suffer from insufficient food, shelter, medicine, and defense” to “even middle-class people routinely suffer from IFSMaD” to “poor people routinely suffer from IFSMaD” to “people suffer from IFSMaD only in exceptional circumstances” to “nobody I’ve ever met has ever heard of anyone who has ever suffered from IFSMaD”, we will undoubtedly identify other sources of suffering and we will worry about those.
Whether we are at that point in a “post-scarcity” environment or not is largely a semantic question.
Getting back to post-scarcity for people who choose not to work, and what resources they would miss out on, a big concern would be not having a home. Clearly this is much more of a concern than drinks on flights. The main reason it is not considered a dire concern is that people’s ability to choose not to work is not considered that vital.
That’s not intended for people who could work but chose not to. They require you to regularly apply for employment. The applications themselves can be stressful and difficult work if you don’t like self-promotion.
Not quite, but almost. (Are you alleging that the unemployed on welfare can afford intercontinental flights, though not ones with good drinks? [EDIT: But yeah, for an unemployed person there seldom are practical, non-signalling reasons to need intercontinental flights. I could probably come up with better examples if I were less sleep-deprived.])
The last time I was unemployed I took an intercontinental flight from NYC to SFO for a job interview. I’d classify that as a practical, non-signalling reason. :-)
So would you say the developed world is currently a post-scatcity society?
Your question implies you think that the main complaints in the developed world involve decent drinks on planes and similarly non-dire concerns. Not sure I agree with that implication.
Pick a dire concern from the developed world today, now how would you explain to an average westerner ~200 years why that concern is dire.
“I’m concerned about nuclear war. It’s like the wars you know, but it’s a lot more deadly and whole areas can be left uninhabitable for centuries.”
“I’m concerned about dying of cancer. Cancer is a disease that many people eventually get once we have reduced the rate of dying from other things.”
“I’m concerned about the NSA reading my email. You don’t have email 200 years ago, but surely you understand how bad it is for the government to spy on people. Imagine that every time you wrote someone a letter, the government hired a scribe to copy it and filed it so they could read it whenever they wanted.”
The first and last problem on your list aren’t related to scarcity. As for the second one:
You left out the part where you get them to understand why this is dire. If you told them the life expectancy of the typical member of a developed country, they’re assume you were describing a utopian society.
I think that someone from 200 years ago would readily understand that people don’t want to die, and that having a longer life expectancy and dying is still not as good as not dying. Yes, there’s always the possibility that they may think that dying is good, but it isn’t, really; that’s just a sour grapes-type rationalization that we only make in the first place because death sucks.
I’d also point out that nuclear war and NSA spying only can happen in a developed society because it takes a lot of resources to do those things. 200 years ago we were simply incapable of making a nuclear weapon, and even if space aliens had dropped the plans for one in their lap, they wouldn’t be able to build one; it takes a huge infrastructure to make one that does indeed imply having overcome many scarcity limitations.
There’s a lot going on in the conversation right now.
I just want to note that you are having a conversation about a slightly different topic than what army1987 was talking about—I think Eugine_Nier is right that many of your examples are not about scarcity per se.
This seems to be a problem with your question, not the answer.
Eugine’s question is in the context of a larger conversation.
Sure, but he is conflating utopian and post-scarcity. It’s not obvious to me that they are isomorphic.
Indeed, and said larger conversation includes TimS expressing confusion about how the question relates to the rest of the conversation. That being the case it is an error to suggest (or imply) that the answers to the question are non-sequitur simply because Jiro answered the question rather than trying to use the question as a chance to support some scarcity related position or another.
I’m confused by why your comment got downvoted. Not only is it correct in the context that scarcity is what is under discussion, but the point that modern developed societies resemble what someone in the past would likely have considered a utopia should be uncontroversial. Long lifespans and good medical care is in one of the things mentioned in the original book “Utopia”. Other historical utopian literature has this aspect, as well as emphasizing education and low infant mortality. New Atlantis would be a prominent example.
I don’t understand your question. I’m not sure I even understand the relevance of your question to the topic of post-scarcity and what post-scarcity might be like.
It seems pretty easy to explain current serious problems to people from the far past or far future (I’m not sure which you mean). Drinks on airplanes is just not a serious problem—it might be hard to explain not serious problems to people from very different cultural contexts.
My point is that if one were to ask someone ~100-200 years ago to imagine a post-scarcity society they’d imagine something that resembles our current society, yet we don’t think of ourselves as post-scarcity. Similarly, I doubt the societies of ~100-200 years in the future will think of themselves as post-scarcity, even if they’d seem that way to us at first glance.
If I asked someone from 100-200 years ago to imagine a post-scarcity society, I’d expect them to say something like “you can have as much of ___ as you want”. Furthermore, I think they’d clearly understand the difference between “have more of it than we get now” and “have as much as we want”, whether it’s lifespan, food and shelter, or anything else. I don’t see why someone from that time period would think a “post-scarcity” society means a society that merely has less scarcity.
“Someone from the past would say our level of something is far beyond what they would have hoped for” doesn’t equate to “someone from the past would say that our level of something is post-scarcity”. Presuming they speak English and the meaning of the term “post-scarcity” can be explained to them, I don’t see why they would confuse the two.
I would expect a typical member of my society, given the prompt “A post-scarcity society is one where you can have as much of _ as you want” and instructions to fill in the blank, to offer things like “food”, “housing,” “consumer goods”, “entertainment,” “leisure”, “Internet access,” “health care”, etc.
Some of those I would not expect a typical member of my society’s 1813 ancestors to offer.
I would not expect a typical member of my society to offer things like “emotional nurturing,” “challenge,” “work that needs to be done,” “friendship,” “love”, “knowledge,” “years of life”, “knowledge”… but I would not be greatly surprised by those answers from any given individual. If I woke up from a coma N years from now and those answers were typical, I would conclude that society had changed significantly.
I would be surprised by answers like “suffering,” “the color blue”, “emptiness”, “corporeal existence,” “qualia”, “mortality.” If I woke up from a coma N years from now and those answers were typical, I would conclude that society had become something unrecognizable.
There’s a difference between “more than I thought I could get” and “as much as I want”, though.
Eugene seems to think that someone from the past would call our society post-scarcity because it provides more of some things than he hopes he would get, rather than as much as he could possibly want. I think that given the definition of a post-scarcity society as one where you can get as much of something as you want, someone from the past would not consider our society to be a post-scarcity society, since it’s very clear that some things—even things that he himself wants—are in limited supply.
My point is that the concept of “post-scarcity” is meaningless. It only seems meaningful because our intuitions conflate the two, or rather the amount of something someone wants at any given time is just a little more than what he thinks he can get. Of course, once the amount he thinks he can get changes, the amount he wants will also change, but at the time the amount he wanted really was that small.
I don’t believe that. People even before modern times talked about living forever.
The “corporeal existence” one actually fits well with what future people may consider a scarce luxury.
Sure, I can imagine a future for which that’s true. Ditto suffering, mortality, and qualia. The others are a bit beyond my imagination, but I suspect if I sat down and worked at it for a while I could come up with something.
The difference is that those wishes have to be contrived and would be considered insane (or confused) by local standards. Corporeal existence is something that that people with current human values are likely to consider a luxury in plausible transhuman circumstances.
Hm.
I can imagine a future in which the default mode of existence for most people is incorporeal (say, as uploads), and being downloaded into a physical body is a luxury. I can imagine a future in which the default mode of existence for most people lacks subjective experience (again, say, as uploads which mostly run “on autopilot,” somewhat like a trance state, perhaps because computing subjective experience is expensive relative to computing other behavior), and being run with subjective experience is a luxury. (I don’t presume p-zombiehood here; I expect there to be demonstrable differences between these states.)
Neither of those strike me as requiring insanity or confusion. Whether the corresponding scenarios are contrived or plausible I’m not prepared to argue; they don’t seem differentially one or the other to me, but I’ll accept other judgments. (If your grounds for believing them differentially contrived are articulable, I’m interested; you might convince me.)
Suffering and mortality, I’ll grant you, require me to essentially posit fashion, which can equally well (or poorly) justify anything.
Some of those answers would be far more common in certain past eras.
In what eras would you expect a typical respondent to have provided which of those answers?
Well, “love” would have been more common during the late 60′s-early 70′s to state one obvious example.
Just to be clear: do you expect that a typical respondent during the late 60′s-early 70′s, given the prompt “A post-scarcity society is one where you can have as much of _ as you want” and instructions to fill in the blank, would reply “love”?
I suspect that in 1813 there were people who worried about whether they would find themselves without enough food, shelter, medicine, or defense from hostile outsiders.
If I described to them the level of food, shelter, medicine, and defense that their counterparts in 2013 had available, I expect they would go “Wow! That’s amazing! Why, with that much abundance, I would never worry again!”
If I then explained to them how often their counterparts in 2013 worried about whether they find themselves without enough food, shelter, medicine, or defense from hostile outsiders, I would expect several reactions. One is incredulity. Another is some variant of “well, I guess some people are never satisfied.” A third is “Huh. Yeah, I guess ‘enough abundance’ is something we approach only asymptotically.”
If I explained to them the other stuff their counterparts in 2013 worried about , and how anxious they sometimes became about such things, I’d expect a similar range of reactions.
For my own part, I think ” ‘Enough abundance’ is something we approach only asymptotically.” is a pretty accurate summary.
So, sure. As we progress from “even wealthy people routinely suffer from insufficient food, shelter, medicine, and defense” to “even middle-class people routinely suffer from IFSMaD” to “poor people routinely suffer from IFSMaD” to “people suffer from IFSMaD only in exceptional circumstances” to “nobody I’ve ever met has ever heard of anyone who has ever suffered from IFSMaD”, we will undoubtedly identify other sources of suffering and we will worry about those.
Whether we are at that point in a “post-scarcity” environment or not is largely a semantic question.
Getting back to post-scarcity for people who choose not to work, and what resources they would miss out on, a big concern would be not having a home. Clearly this is much more of a concern than drinks on flights. The main reason it is not considered a dire concern is that people’s ability to choose not to work is not considered that vital.
So get welfare or whatever other related social program is available in your area.
That’s not intended for people who could work but chose not to. They require you to regularly apply for employment. The applications themselves can be stressful and difficult work if you don’t like self-promotion.
Only if you care about whether you get the job.
Not quite, but almost. (Are you alleging that the unemployed on welfare can afford intercontinental flights, though not ones with good drinks? [EDIT: But yeah, for an unemployed person there seldom are practical, non-signalling reasons to need intercontinental flights. I could probably come up with better examples if I were less sleep-deprived.])
The last time I was unemployed I took an intercontinental flight from NYC to SFO for a job interview. I’d classify that as a practical, non-signalling reason. :-)
Hypothesis: you had savings for such a situation, or got aid from someone else. ?
(I would also classify it as practical, non-signalling, given the current information. :) )