It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)
weforum.org
weforum.org
There is a cadre of people who argue, "really? you wouldn't survive a day outside this so-called captivity, tough guy" and then go on to justify how their various compromises are somehow moral. To me that whole line of argument is just indoors cats lecturing outdoors cats about how to manage the shame of dependency, which outdoors cats just don't have.
If we do not learn to limit the power of people who wield tech, we will become their captives. This was the whole reason to be a hacker, to act as a check on having humanity dominated by our own tech.
That's a big leap, and you've given no explanation for it. Perhaps we have different understandings of what captivity means, so it'd be helpful if you define your terms. To me, captivity is a location (or metaphorical location, so a situation) you want to leave, but can't. In the article, the narrator does not indicate a desire to leave, or any difficulty doing so if they wished. The bit about being recorded hints at it, but we'd have to assume there are no other cities in the world, or some other unstated bit about a police state.
Are children captives of their parents? I wouldn't use that word to describe the relationship.
But maybe using captive in only a pejorative sense is the problem. I don't think my cat hates me (quite the opposite!), rather she follows me around like a puppy dog and is clearly excited when I get home. But it is difficult for me to conclude that she is free.
I really think the term is fuzzy and the boundaries are not clearly defined. If that is true, then hyperbole can be useful for us to question and refine that boundary. Questioning if we ourselves are captive when we don't realize it. After all, that's what Huxley portrayed. I don't think people in his story would consider themselves captive, but outsiders would. We could say the same about cults or certain followings. To one faith may be shackles and to another it may be liberating. The boundary isn't clear.
Going back to the story's protagonist, using this definition of "free" it's not clear how much the protagonist is aware of these kinds of influences, and therefore we don't know where on the spectrum of freedom they'd be.
I don't think Stockholm syndrome is relevant to the experience of a dog. First, Wikipedia says there's a bit of disagreement as to whether the phenomenon is real. Second, my guess is the mechanism for it relies on a human's sense of society and shame.
I didn't agree that the cult member was not free in a binary sense, because I don't believe freedom is binary. The cult members are free to the extent they understand the causes of their choices, which presumably is very little. If you're looking for nuance, then let's avoid binary definitions. One isn't either free or not free. Even 2-state transistors are actually only 2-state by approximation.
As for Liebniz, I don't think anything I've said is inconsistent with his beliefs. According to Liebniz, if an actor only has one or a small limited set of available options then they are not free (spontaneity). In the case of your dog, it depends highly upon you for its own basic needs: food, water, shelter. It also depends on you for its higher needs: companionship and a sense of purpose (or role). Because of this I do not think Liebniz would consider your dog free. It does not have much of a choice. But if we are talking about the spectrum, well your dog does have a choice to run away and attempt to survive on its own. We know it wouldn't make it far, but it might not know that (about things like the pound, leash laws, or human civilization norms). But the dog does have some freedom because you do give it some reign. Probably moreso than the member of the cult.
Similarly I'd say that you are more free than your dog. You can go on vacations and travel. You can eat different food and you can choose what food. It may be influenced by others, but that is different than dictated. But still you are beholden to having a job and living in society which does limit some sense of freedom. Similarly this story is about questioning who is more free by presenting the Huxleyesk lifestyle. In A Brave New World people are able to have all their desires, so why do we not consider them free?
> Ever watch an ad that manipulated you?
I think the question comes down to this, as opposed to what you wrote. The problem is not when you know you are being manipulated, but when you don't. It would be naive to think you're above this, considering that ads do work, considering that they've been a worthwhile tool for companies for hundreds of years and have been the basis for trillion dollar companies that exist today. It certainty warrants questioning if you have gained or loss freedom with this system in place. This clearly limits your choice or maybe more accurately heavily influences the weights on the decision set. I believe Leibniz would consider this a reduction of freedom (as do I).
Exactly. Thus my assertion that I'm free to the extent I am aware of how my environment and society affects me. Though that's not a complete definition, as we've discussed the issue of not just soft power, but also hard constraints.
One wrinkle is that some advertisements aren't only manipulation, but information as well. They're freedom-reducing to the extent they undetectably manipulate, but freedom-increasing to the extent the provide information that allows more choices!
Further, the protagonist in our story has new choices that aren't options in our society today. It's not clear that the protagonist has a net-negative freedom experience, compared with today.
- grocery stores
- transportation
- electricity
- various repair-people such as electricians and plumbers
- an employer
- a well-regulated economy
as "being a independent outdoor cat," but then suddenly once you're renting your clothes instead of buying them that's a bridge too far, and you're "captive."
You're right that the terminology of "freedom" and "captivity" is weird...I've always thought it's strange because historically it's been so relative. But I think quibbling over where to draw the line is missing the point, and basically has the same problem as what you're decrying. When we have the power to influence the outcome of something, we shouldn't resign in despair because we can't cleanly classify it...we can still make informed decisions under that uncertainty.
Now look what happens when centrally managed grocery chains, power companies, repair services, etc. move in. All management is centralized. All locals are now employed by one of the big companies following corporate protocol. They are now easily replaceable, so 80% of the town works on a minimum wage after completing a one-week training course. Most of the wealth gets transferred to the corporations. Another 10% of the town works as middle management for the corporations, stuck playing dirty political games. The luckiest 10% keeps positions that cannot be taken by corporations: small niche businesses, trades, doctor practices. Since most of the people are replaceable, people don't really need other people. They depend on corporations instead, so maintaining interpersonal relations becomes unnecessary. People hate each other over small disagreements. They envy others' jobs. They consider life very unfair because in the absence of a clearly visible connection between the merit and the outcome, the grass on the other side always looks greener.
The "well-regulated economy" usually implies raising the taxes for top earners and redistributing the wealth to lower earners. Except, the corporations usually find tricks to avoid it, so you end up taxing the few remaining non-replaceable people, and redistributing it down the road. Supply/demand comes into play, so asset prices rise accordingly, 80% of people still cannot afford a decent living from their salary. Self-improvement still doesn't pay, since the corporations want people to be replaceable. So, social tensions are still high, and on top of that, we start having a shortage of doctors, niche shops, etc., because with the higher taxes and hostile attitude from lower-earners, it's just not worth the hassle anymore. On top of that, we now have a class of social justice politicians, who appeal to groups of people by pitting them against other groups and promising better treatment at the expense of other groups. So not only the pie is shrinking, but we are now supposed to fight for it.
If you want to fix the problem, you need to incentivize personal self-improvement again. Tax the hell out of monopolies, platforms and aggregators. Make sure running your small business (and learning how to make your customers happy) becomes viable again. Give the economic leverage back to the people putting their time into it, and not to the abstract corporations.
If economics taught me anything is that there is always trade-offs; what are possible trade-offs when there is substantial constrains on monopolies, platforms, and aggregators ?
So while middle class jobs running mom-and-pop retail stores are lost, we may gain a commensurate decrease in the cost of goods. I’m not an economist, so I can’t begin to speculate whether this is a net economic gain. Is it better to have more higher paying jobs but more expensive goods, or fewer higher paying jobs and cheaper goods? Is this a false dichotomy? It’s interesting to note that inflation in the price of pretty much all consumer goods has dramatically lagged income inflation over the last 20 years[0], suggesting that net consumer savings have indeed been substantial.
[0] https://www.patientrightsadvocate.org/price-changes-on-selec...
Now a similar thing is happening to the middle class and I don't think enough people will see it this way before it's too late.
The benefits to centralization/aggregation is that things can be made uniform everywhere, which can make things convenient. (e.g. if language A had a monopoly on languages, it would be easy to communicate with others no matter where you go)
It then follows that - the downsides to limiting centralization (or encouraging decentralization) is that things are not necessarily uniform everywhere. (e.g. might be difficult to communicate when everyone's speaking different languages everywhere; difficult to get brand X in market Y)
A well regulated economy usually implies that people can count on stable laws, enforceable contracts, and markets that aren't distorted by the abuse of power.
Taxation usually implies people "paying their fair share" to keep the government working, although the folks to the right often note that for the folks on the left, this usually does seem to mean always wanting to raise the taxes for top earners (and vice versa).
> It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.
I guess maybe I'm an indoor cat?
> There is a cadre of people who argue, "really? you wouldn't survive a day outside this so-called captivity, tough guy"
I don't understand, this piece is fiction so by definition we're all surviving outside that 'captivity', unless you're trying to extend it to say that all of modern society is also captivity
Destroy the ontology, identity and neccesity of tech and you will have your material world back under the rule of a weapon, as it has been. Do you want that?
> First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly.
> Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes.
> Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy - the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes.
> Shopping? I can't really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.
> Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
I can't tell if it's written by a normal person, some buzzword-spouting AI, or someone from the 80's who's never interacted with modern technology.
EDIT: And of course, how could I forget, "In our city we don't pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there."
I hope the latter, because I can not image a normal person viewing any of those things as good...
This view of the future right out of a dystopian horror
Even despite the current situation, there are many people desperate for a return to the economic status-quo.
??? We easily managed this year.
Shrinking GDP one year is much different from it becoming the norm.
Case in point - the WEF tweeted a (now deleted) video about 8 predictions for 2030. The first is: "You will own nothing. And you'll be happy"[1]. My questions - who does the "owning" and does this apply to the "elites" that attend Davos?
I am not one for conspiracy theories, but this is not a conspiracy anymore. The "elites" don't even hide their intentions.
[1]https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/jio3r3/youll_ow...
For me it is not happiness, but intelligence.
Two weeks ago, the economist asked: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing? [1]
Yes. It is dangerous. For them.
They want to push happiness. They want to replace GDP with a Gross National Happiness.
Their wet dream is a populace of happy but unquestioning people.
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/10/24/c...
Now they can blame covid (instead of taking responsibility for bad policy that got us here) and you see that through their marketing of the Great Reset.
The "lizard people" are counting on you being apathetic, ignorant, and/or in denial. Even better if you criticize people who bring the "lizard people plans" to light as tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists, shifting credibility away from the critics and back to the "lizard people."
Why would you do that? Bc you likely have a mortgage, kids, and a 401k. Therefore, you have a personal and financial interest in keeping the system going - so far, you're still benefiting from the system...until you're not. That's the point you will be forced to make hard choices.
> ...they're inconsequential bureaucrats.
Inconsequential bureaucrats don't travel to Switzerland on private jets with body guards just to go skiing and yuk it up.
Well, I suppose that could work out if we have a communist revolution in 2025, and we introduce the backs of those elites to various walls.
Otherwise, fuck that noise.
Come to think of it, about 50 years ago you could afford a mortgage on a detached house from a single salary, where the other parent would dedicate their time to raising/teaching the kids. That would also make people need each other more, and care more about alignment of values, since that's something you want to pass to the next generation.
Currently, 2 median salaries will barely pay for your apartment rent. Worse, in many lower-level jobs you are expected to be an "independent contractor" and stitch your living from several part-time sources, multiplying commute time and draining your time and energy. And I can't even think of what all those people will have to do when the old age catches up to them to the point where the previous generation would simply retire.
Most disturbingly, many people don't seem to see a problem with it. There is a lot of activism targeting many flaws of our society, but the fact that having a family and passing your knowledge and beliefs to the next generation has become a luxury, somehow receives very little light.
But a big problem is that any criticism is considered a bad thing. I actually run into this problem a lot when I tell people it's more important to criticize the leaders of your party, because you have a voice in that party. So you can actually iterate and improve your party. You don't have a voice in the opposing party and many times complaining about the other is used smugly to express how your party is superior.
We forgot that critique is about improving, not hating.
Imagine 2 hot dog stands across the road. Alice makes sour hot dogs, while Bob makes sweet ones. They both focus on how they make the hot dogs. If fewer people want to buy the sour ones, or customers start giving strange looks, Alice will think about tweaking the recipe. Likewise the Bob can now charge more, or open a spin-off at the next intersection. The fun part is that Alice and Bob can even be buddies. They can go play pool together in the evening, because business is separate from your private life.
Now imagine a HotDogCo buying both stands. Both Alice and Bob now follow exactly the same tested and optimized recipe, patented by the corporation. Their hot dogs are indistinguishable. So, they now focus on what they are. If someone gives you a strange look, you interpret it as a personal insult. If Alice sells fewer hot dogs than Bob, she will think it's due to her gender, some other identity attribute. The energy that could be spent on improving the recipe is now spent on blaming Bob across the road for having an unfair advantage, and asking your followers to boycott him.
The corporations are happy. Out of each 0.99$ hot dog, 0.5$ goes to the corporate profit, 0.2$ - to the ingredients, and Alice and Bob get paid minimum wage. They are also interchangeable and are now too busy fighting each other to launch an independent stand and keep that $0.5 to themselves. Mission accomplished, HotDogCo stocks soar, while Alice and Bob are now locked into misery, hatred, and zero savings or retirement perspectives.
[0] Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov: https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...
1. Go out to eat and for entertainment MUCH, MUCH more often. 2. Take more frequent, more distant, and much more lavish vacations. 3. Live in homes that are approximately 40% larger. 4. Purchase many more electronics and other semi-durable consumer goods. 5. Purchase much more clothing. 6. Drive more, and newer vehicles. 7. Eat many more calories (obesity necessitates higher health care costs)
For most people in the US: if you downsized your home, traveled on a modest vacation once every two years, limited eating out to special occasions only, wore the same set of clothing for years on end, owned a single, used but dependable car for the entire household, watched two movies per year, etc, you'd probably be able to run a single-income household in 2020.
Nah, not really. Working-class Americans are still having plenty of kids. Putting off starting a family ("I don't want to settle down yet"; "I don't make X amount of money"; "I haven't 'found myself' and lived out my idealized twenties") is mostly a PMC[0] striver thing.
> 2 median salaries will barely pay for your apartment rent.
Maybe in NYC or Frisco. In the rest of the country, people can get along just fine on two salaries. My parents sure did.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional-managerial_class
It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies.
I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have no understanding of human nature.
Actually, there is a larger and larger gap between educated people with office jobs who earn a good salary to do "stuff that hadn't been worried about before"... and the rest of the barely educated people who barely earn anything and get to do all the manual work (taking care of the children, cleaning homes, offices, cooking food, delivering food, harvesting delicate fruit, etc.). The gap is bigger and bigger, despite or thanks to the progress of humanity.
In a world where less of the manual people are asked to do manual work for some reason, these uneducated people won't transition to other jobs. Best case scenario is they get a minimal universal income to stay calm at home and generate clicks on social media to feed AI some new data. Worst case scenario is they will want to work, and be angry at society for making them feel useless.
It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much.
On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and livelihood, and have to settle for a lower paying, dumber job.
That said, a lot of jobs replaced by automation are already low-paying, dumb jobs. Why stand 8 hours / day doing a repetitive manual job if a thing can do it just as well? Why expose yourself to the worst the internet comes up with when you can train an AI to detect CP?
I don't believe we'll see jobs becoming largely obsolete in our lifetime, but I would like to fantasize about a future where work is a choice and everybody can live comfortably (quality housing, food and spending money) even without a job. Not going to happen as long as capitalism and the never ending pursuit of profit and profit increase are still a thing though. But, we're seeing some hopeful developments in that regard, with things like UBI and the like.
(Aside: I don't believe UBI will work in the end, if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does. UBI only works if it's coupled with assurances of housing and that it's enough to cover all basic needs, which right now depend largely on the area you live in. I couldn't get an affordable rental place on my own income some years ago, because first there was a 15+ year waiting list, and later I was earning too much so I was thrown out to the 'free market', and there's a pretty big gap between the most expensive social housing and the cheapest free market housing. That gap is filled up with 'student' houses, think houses split up into multiple units / rooms. But nobody should be forced to live like that if they're out of college and have a paid full-time job.
I think you are assuming an auction like situation for stuff like limited housing but it doesn't have to be like that. You can build more.
I believe the argument for UBI is based on economic utility: $1000 a month is worth more to a poor person than a rich person.
I want UBI to work. But I haven't heard of a good strategy to mitigate what I just described.
what we don't generally have is an optimal dispersion of capital (and power) to fulfill many of those wishes. concentration of capital and power also concentrates labor allocation and decision-making (something capitalism in ideal form opposes), so instead of drawing from the ingenuity of hundreds of millions, we're trending toward that of hundreds of thousands. it doesn't matter how clever those hundreds of thousands are, they'll never out-imagine hundreds of millions (or billions worldwide).
ubi is predicated on the idea that lots of people will have nothing to do soon, but that's only effectuated in a dystopian world where capital and power are extremely concentrated. rather than altruism, ubi is rather a critical step toward fascist corporatism, acting to stave off potential opposition by trickling down a tiny bone to the masses. the populace assuming mass joblessness are falling into the rhetorical trap of the subjugating corporatists, not accessing a benevolent key to economic and social freedom.
Right now few bright folks are interested in revolutionizing affordable housing, public education, or payday lending because the money's not in it. They make a lot more money advertising to the affluent class or owning a marketplace that gives them vacation rentals or cheap transportation.
If we had UBI, prices would eventually equilibrate to eat all the new disposable income, but the gold rush in the process might build a bunch more halfway-decent housing.
As far as real cash payouts go, there's value to them, but not universally. In order to have the maximum impact they need to be limited to people with little to no other income.
AI can also help augment the work of “high-paying, smart jobs”.
Meaning that instead of hiring ten lawyers, you can hire one lawyer and a license to lawyer.ai which will empower the one lawyer to do the work of ten.
If you have automated cars tomorrow on the streets, most of the truck and taxi drivers are not ready. Heck, most of the oil countries in the middle-east are not ready for a post-oil economy.
Population capacities and thus overpopulation aren't fixed things meaning overpopulation is relative to conditions. It would be absurd to call algae overpopulated if they thrive just fine at concentrations in one epoch with different population conditions just because it would cause red tide in another epoch.
If you live in the USA and Europe, you are the recipient of generations of global technological dominance. It's hard to understand the possibility of being on the other side of that.
AI is all nice and rosy but how do we know it's "right"? How can a machine be indifferent to human influences? How do we know it's not biased? Does it discriminate? It's a not a human, it can't "think" like one, it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument. It's a dumb machine feeding off data, unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point.
AI is given too much credit for a little bit of intelligence (if you can call it that, I think that's how we perceive it), however as society changes so the AI has to. Does AI understand brexit yet? Does it influence policy decisions? Can it understand how people will react? Can it help during a pandemic? Can it talk and negotiate?
Brexit was dumb and so is the UK.
Also:
> it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument
applies to most humans, and
> unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point
applies to all humans.
The lucky ones will be shining their shoes, giving them massages, tutoring their kids, cooking their meals, and giving them manicures.
Many will prefer the human touch for things like that, even if they could be done by machines, and having human servants has always been a status symbol.
This is what the non-wealthy among us have to look forward to.
You have used technology right?
You know it is all mostly shit that breaks down, crashes, and gets replaced and thrown out on an 18 month cycle?
What I think lots of people get wrong is forgetting just how crappy consumer tech is, and industrial/military isn't far behind. We may get AI working well in 5-25 years, but I doubt deployments will be any less buggy.
Repairing & provisioning the billions of bots will be most of the "tech" jobs. Think like the IT dept at your company that hands out new laptops, times a million.
For the first, you are right - certainly in that timescale. For the later, I assume we will need to justify our continued existence.
It is extremely well defined. The best example I can point you to is from the 1990's by Russell & Norvig in their seminal work "Artificial Intelligence" which coalesces a half century of research. They spend the first 100 pages clearly defining the types of domains and vocabulary needed to define the space of AI: it is an exhaustive analysis with citations going back decades, covering early thinkers like Norbert Wiener and Von Neumann. Your claim indicates you haven't really studied the field. But everyone jumping into tensorflow on a raspberry pi has probably had zero exposure the to decades of research put into AI.
Your second claim about a giant mind that might dwarf all of humanity, is, well, grandiose sci-fi. Much like Dyson Spheres or Time Travel.
...simply because even a reasonably intelligent AI would have the ability to improve itself at a rate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution.
And when it turns, turning it back is HARD / near impossible.
Do people read this and think that is the sort of life they would want in the future?
Something that rings very true for me: Sharing is amazingly underutilized (unfortunately I feel it's a deeply cultural problem right now, but oh well, over time things change): I have absolutely no inherent need to own a car. I don't need to own a Hammer. I don't need to own a bicycle pump. Actually, it's intensely inefficient how many things I do have to own and store right now, to be able to only use 5 Minutes every other week or maybe even only half a year.
What I instead need is convenient access to these things. If you can show me a model where I can have that without the burden and cost of solo-owning it – something the author is implying will be a solved problem – I am all for that.
It's like a "Book Library", (eg centralised local place for storage and co-ordination) but for tools. There's one here in Melbourne (Australia) with about 400 members, and over 1000 tools:
* https://www.brunswicktoollibrary.org
* https://brunswicktoollibrary.myturn.com/library/inventory/br...
They have power tools (~200), hand tools (~600), garden tools (~200), automotive stuff, electrical/soldering gear, etc.
And they have occasional um... workshops (or something similar) teaching people how to repair things. eg:
* Bike repair (Sep 2020) - https://www.facebook.com/events/728114278044351/
* General repair (Feb 2020) https://www.facebook.com/events/613979845834779/
Seems to work really well, at least in this case. :)
The lack of environmental problems and abundance of clean energy also sounds good, though it just appears magically in the essay, so we can't say much about it.
Lack of privacy is terrible, and we can make it much better. Flying cars are terrible. Not owning everything is terrible. I'm the complete opposite of a materialist person, but I can understand how it's very useful to own some things. I mean, besides your underwear. Some might have sentimental value, and others are used so much that it's more practical to own them and know they are always available at the place you left them.
It's like all of those breathless journo articles about insect protein: they sound fine until the word "replace" comes in. Maybe some folks are jazzed about eating bugs, but I am not, and would prefer not to have my meat replaced by insect protein to keep someone else's utopia going, but someone is going to have the bright idea to make the choice for me.
Where we're heading, our top castes will comprise mostly of people who are manipulative, short-term thinkers, vengeful, insecure, arrogant and psychopathic. Not great for society.
It really does make you think about their world at the end. And its not really evil oppressive world like 1984. Its just purely mechanical construction that to us look like dystopia.
I agree we are and are heading is technological aristocracy where tech is used to keep people in line. Divided over crazy theories, societal issues and squabbling over leftovers.
Just give them youtube and they come up with the 'hidden truths' and then they fight with secret kabals and 'morons' who don't see the signs.
Meanwhile amazons googles and other industries are literally squeezing all small business out of existence.
Do you think an Amazon Town could be created where all you shopping has to be done via amazon but you get 20 or 50% off. How far are we from that reality?
What I would disagree with is that the people who push this system forward are far from short-term thinkers, vengeful, insecure. They schemed this system up long time ago and look for every angle to push it ahead.
How quickly 9/11 from tragedy was turned into patriot act opportunity?
Unfortunately a bunch of folks read that and thought it was a great idea.
Every single person in that world IS selected for their role in society based on merit. There is no asterics attached there with +1 conditions.
I am not saying that it is a good system as a matter of fact I call it dystopian, only that everyone in it was rather content with their lives.
The modern reformulation would be genetic engineering or at least genetic screening. I'm sure we're not that far away from the wealthy classes testing their embryos and only implanting the ones that have the highest intelligence, least propensity for disease, etc.
Arrive on time, don't question authority, learn to follow what you are being told.
After that they are lead to believe living on dept and credit cards is the only way to be happy.
And they are stuck in shitty job that they cannot quit since they have interest to play. So they keep their heads down and just keep going.
They also forgoed a lot of automation and engineered society to make use of the stunted lower classes. I recall a scene where they had elevator operators, even though automatic elevators had been invented when the book was written.
> The modern reformulation would be genetic engineering or at least genetic screening. I'm sure we're not that far away from the wealthy classes testing their embryos and only implanting the ones that have the highest intelligence, least propensity for disease, etc.
That's literally the backstory of the movie Gattica. Though I think the genetic engineering in that movie controlled recombination, so engineered children got all the best genes of their parents. IIRC, people who weren't engineered (like us) lived in slums and were only given menial jobs regardless of talent.
You will own nothing, you will be worthless. You won't even be able to have a girlfriend/boyfriend or friends for that matter; real human relationships are reserved for the elites. You will get as many VR friends as you want though.
Already it's kind of happening. Look at how many friends rich people have; a lot. Look at how many friends poor people have; very few.
Of course, they're not real friends, but still more real than light projected into your eyeballs.
Trying to censor information is just not going to work. Controlling the media is not going to help beyond a certain point. People know what's going on and they'll be taking the real conversations offline. When everyone collectively realizes what's been happening, the backlash is going to be terrifying and unforgiving. The more you suppress the truth, the worse it will be when it all comes out.
The current elites don't have the ability to suppress billions of people who were raised on freedom as the central principle of their existence.
That sounds like a problem that could be solved through military automation. (!)
I hope I'm not too cynical, but I think "freedom" is more of a meme than something that most people value. Whenever there are news stories about governments spying on their own citizens or restricting free speech, most people seem to just shrug and move on with their lives.
BTW why am I hearing this 'freedom is not important' stuff from so many people on HN? Is that what your leaders are preaching? I'd be suspicious of your leaders if that were me.
Mostly, yes.
Most items people own seem like clutter to me. I would much rather own the absolute minimum and then get anything else as I need it, rather than have to own a lot of stuff.
More stuff = more problems.
I think the author purposefully avoided saying anyone that.
But the part of the story that stood out to me viscerally was the neglect of maintenance crews and the design work, etc and how that plays into a status hierarchy. It is the same frustrating arrogance I sometimes see in city dwellers who just don't understand how many people are physically labouring to to maintain the artificial environment of a large city.
A handwave and "robots will do all that stuff by 2030" is too fantastic to stomach.
If I want to cook at home and have to order everything, I assume it won't just be there in 5 minutes. And then what? If everything is shared does someone come pick it up when someone else needs it? Do I take it somewhere?
Also, are people delivering these things? Or robots? And how can this be free? He also mentions that most work can be done at anytime. Well, if the premisse is order everything I need, even for cooking, that has to be done right away, no?
I might be totally off, but this doesn't make any sense to me.
Not that I'm advocating for this future in any way, but I assume that a more realistic version of this (especially for as near as 2030) is that many people still have jobs that have an actual schedule. Maybe we can be optimistic and dream that people get to work less than 40 hours a week to have a reasonable quality of life.
But the idea of "I own nothing" cannot conceivable extend to personal items like clothing. That doesn't make any sense. In a future of "no ownership", you'd still own your shirt and toothbrush. Probably you'd still own your playstation (but do you actually own your video games today??? Can you play them offline? Does your console have ads?) as well. You wouldn't own a car, or your home (you'd have rights while you occupy your home, but not after you move), maybe you wouldn't own tools that are too expensive/specialized to be almost-free.
So for your example, I imagine that immediate delivery services might still exist, but that would be kind of a "high class" service and might be expensive. More than likely, you'd have Amazon dropping off your weekly grocery list on your designated day (e.g., "Wednesdays are trash day and grocery day in my neighborhood").
I highly doubt that we'll have that much more robot workforce by 2030. The only industry where that's possible is brick-and-mortar shopping having no more cashiers, which I do see as somewhat likely.
But yeah, I generally agree with you. Especially in this:
> But the idea of "I own nothing" cannot conceivable extend to personal items like clothing. That doesn't make any sense ... maybe you wouldn't own tools that are too expensive/specialized to be almost-free.
Wake up. Clothes have been delivered overnight. Put them on, wear for the day. At the end of the day, put them in a box outside wherever you're staying the night.
That seems like a feasible thing to build today, if you ignored all the current consequences of fast-fashion.
We're not far off to rent that, with streaming. Which I can totally see myself doing one day actually.
You do this once or twice a year. The rest of the time you just order regular, good old delivery to your home.
But no, rent isn't free, I pay through the nose to live in a location where it's possible to rely on transit (in non pandemic times, anyways). And I do hard work to pay that rent, I'm not sure what business meetings I could illegally sublet out my tiny living room to fetch over $3000 per month.
I do get things delivered, quite often (groceries weekly and sometimes restaurant meals). It's absurdly expensive and once the pandemic is over I plan to cut the deliveries out of my life as much as I can (I cancelled prime in January and resubscribed in March, oops!)
1. Infinity is really, really big.
2. 0 is really, really small.
Infinite clean energy with no cost? Nonexistent transaction costs (economics meaning)? Yeah, this is probably a very mild description of what the world might look like with those constraints removed.
To me, this is the economic equivalent of a think-piece on what the world would be like if gravity and magnetism disappeared as forces. It may be interesting, and there is likely value in such counterfactual thinking. But it's not something we need to plan for or a goal to aspire to. It's a thought experiment.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
Like, I get that this is a post-automation utopia, but at no point in history has capitalist automation ever meant that people need to do less work. It has always meant that people lose their income and go hungry. "We created a society which encourages people to innovate & pitch in without punishing them when they don't work" is, sociologically speaking, a much more interesting and important development than "the algorithm recommends me clothes in the morning."
The most interesting thing is that the author seems not to realize that this all entails an end to capitalism. They say things like "my living room is used for business meetings when I'm not there," but what business meetings? How is anyone making money in a society where everything's free? If no one's making money, is it even a business? Does everyone do it purely out of passion? Or do we needed some form of soft incentive for people to be involved in the economy? What form would that take?
This article raises a million interesting questions, but seems interested only in entertaining the most boring ones, like "how would algorithms be involved with this?" and "what if I had no privacy?"
It's as if they picture every business being like Gmail, where it's free because that's in the interest of the service provider. But Google still needs to turn a profit from somewhere. It' can't be Gmails all the way down. He's trying to propose communism, but imagining that that would merely entail businesses gradually reducing all their prices down to zero for some unexplained reason.
And yet so many things seem on the right track. It's the polar opposite of the outrageously inefficient model where everything you use, you own, and for 99.9% of the time, the thing just sits there depreciating or taking up space. Regarding cars, as a city liver who needs a car (but has no driveway or garage), I certainly yearn for a better way.
Obviously some things are going to be bothersome, such as the idea of people holding business meetings in your living room when you are away. But I do like the idea of more sharing, and letting go -- at least a bit -- of the urge to own so much stuff.
Owning my things provides value even when I’m not using them, because I benefit from excluding other people (my competition) from using them.
Example: The sports car locked in my garage helps keep sports cars away from other people, which maintains their benefit of conferring status. It provides utility even if I basically never drive it.
This side of human nature is forgotten at our peril.
This article seems to be written from the perspective of someone who likes spending their time in coffee shops and riding their bike around in circles. Might as well be a hamster in a cage. It’s like the millennial version of brave new world, no sex, boring drugs, and the pervasive feeling that no one knows what they’re doing.
oh my special personality defects will probably mean I won't ever be able to go anywhere, do anything, and will eventually starve to death under this system.
If anything it's done away with some of my previous scheduling constraints. No more oil changes or tire rotations! No more grocery trips! Etc etc.
Personally I don't like it because in a renter world, the owners have an extraordinary amount of power.
Even with a well optimized sharing economy inside a highly competitive environment, you'll look for ways to break the optimization process favorable to yourself. If everything schedules at my whim I'll be sure and use the most scarce and difficult to obtain resources to lock them down and trade that time to others for something else I want. Short of living in a post scarcity economy, it would never be feasible.
The social safety net here in Sweden won't let me starve. But to impress my friends, I have to buy much more than calories. The food I serve must be climate compensated, organic, small batch, good for animals and people. Buying food becomes an exercise in personal branding.
> Author's note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.
> My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology
This is straight out of every sci fi dystopia where those at the privileged productive core are taught to fear and pity the outsiders. Complete with the straw men that the others chose to reject technology, rather than merely rejecting the invisible authoritarianism they're swimming in. Though usually the story is about waking up, rather than how good the dream is.
I don't think this piece helps the discussion at all, but is rather just more fuel for the populist-neoreactionary backlash. If this is the future "the elites" are grooming us to accept, then I can understand the desire to burn it all down.
The sustainable path forward involves making technology work for us as individuals, rather than abdicating our individual autonomy to opaque systems that are undoubtedly controlled by powerful overlords.
Truly amazing how it's apparently inefficient for ordinary working people to own things that we actually use and enjoy sometimes, but it's perfectly efficient for the investor class to own the fruit of our labors.
Honestly, a complete reversal of any real notion of efficiency.
If the "1%", so to speak, gave up all their yachts and patents, and ownership of ride-hailing services and farming were fully socialized, then maybe I'd get on board.
Until then, I'll believe that this is the wealthy trying to milk even more freedom from us.
As for sharing everything, it's a good theory but would never work in practice. Have you ever lived with people outside of your family or bubble? Some people are filthy and don't even take care of things they own, let alone things they don't. Are you expecting to be able to select who you are happy to share with?
I'm already living that present. It's really nice. Walkable neighbourhoods full of interesting things to see and do, because that space isn't being wasted on car storage.
> As for sharing everything, it's a good theory but would never work in practice. Have you ever lived with people outside of your family or bubble? Some people are filthy and don't even take care of things they own, let alone things they don't.
That seems like a problem that can be solved technologically. Certainly e.g. Zipcars have always been clean when I got in them, somehow.
Maybe only affluent people currently use Zipcars. I really don't want to share a car with certain people and neither do you. The more I think about it seems like it would do more to divide people than anything.
and also stupid, since the needs of a business meeting are rather different than the needs of a living room, and living rooms must service all sorts of people and families.
And finally families own stuff because kids need and want stuff, you're not going to have your kids favorite doll delivered when they want to play with it.
The main point of owning things is that you get to use them when you want to use them.
People keep those things in cupboards because when they decide on a whim to make pasta they do just that. The same goes for all the rest - having cars, houses and so on.
Unless there's some kind of Philip K Dick-style machine that near-instantly delivers good X to your apartment through a vacuum tube or something, that as-a-service bs won't fly. No one wants to wait hours (on the best case given our current logistics network) after deciding to make pasta to actually get the pasta machine.
In my case it would be cheaper to rent a car than own one as I use it relatively infrequently, but every time I rent I need to wait in the queue picking it up and dropping it off. It probably uses two or three hours of my life every time I rented.
We're warned. Now what we have to do is to work on reducing the power of malicious individuals who would want to read our thoughts by force. That's a political/societal thing more than technical. Or is it? what if it was financially not worth it for anyone to do such things...
No? Just me? Never mind...
I say this because it used to be a sort of fantasy by some of us that they could get rich in Silicon Valley by renting a bunk, taking Uber instead of owning a car, eschewing privacy in favor of more convenient app experiences, work out of coworking spaces, and overall live in "the future".
With the decline of big cities and people waking up to the reality of globalism, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how skeptical we've become of such propaganda, yet I still find it surprising.
The irony of this vision of the future is that, in order to rent, someone must own. This means that if there ever cam a point where even 25% of the population lived in a fully-rented state of being, a significant portion of the population will have been made into serfs and lords. Of course, we do already have a large degree of this dynamic. It's quite different from the vision of the future we had hundreds of years ago; the one where we imagined everyone being able to develop their own independent fiefdoms within a society.
> The lenses cause their wearers to see, not their squalid surroundings, but the Overworld, a vastly superior version of reality where a hut is a palace, gruel is a magnificent feast, etc. — "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" on a grand scale.
The 2020 election appears a step in this direction.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_the_Overworld
Care to elaborate?
- This sounds like an absolute nightmare scenario for me and most people I know.
- The year 2030 is virtually tomorrow in terms of societal progress. Nothing of the sort will happen by 2030. This is like science fiction authors of the 1970s predicting that we'll colonize the solar system by 2001.
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2019/07/25/gap-between-inc...
By that admittedly too-simple analysis, houses peaked in unaffordability in 1980 and have been only modestly less affordable since 2000. (Much of this is likely explained by the median house in 2000 being much larger than the median house in 1960, having nearly doubled in size between 1973 and 2016.)
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z-A7AhhKNcVbvq_n8fPP...
[1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...
No future prospects, stuck in a rut, deadend boringness.
Proceeds to kill self. At least toast was nice.
Sure we can own trivial things like laptops and what not, but that's not really something to secure your future with. Younger generations will be forever slaves and work to the grave, unless you happen to be born in fortunate family or get incredibly lucky.
Growing wealth is a simple formula: [amount spent] < [amount earned]. Rinse and repeat for a given length of time, and you will have more wealth than you started with.
Kidding, but only sort of.
IF the answer is government, please just stop. A central ruling class? This has always ended badly. If the answer is private enterprise, ask why accept the role you have chosen and instead work to accumulate the goods you can provide as services. Then you have freedom - from rents, from control, and the removal of spontaneity.
Of course you still have the leadership class of people that could be corrupt, but that can be solved e.g. by sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
+ you need anti-monopoly laws and some solutions preventing competition-to-the-bottom (e.g. if marginal cost of service becomes 0, it may no longer make sense to compete for it, so it needs to enter some sort of maintenance mode to keep quality in check)
My point is - how can someone express true happiness when they are controlled by others? With all these services, there would be no justification for betterment. It all sounds like an advertisement for centralized authoritatism - "We'll take care of your wants and dreams; you just give us your all".
Products or services are only free either because - you are the product or - temporarily to kill any other competitors, become a monopole and start charging a lot
Because, you know... money has to get in...
I try to be careful with this phrasing. Because I do believe it's true for most things.
But then look at open source software, which powers SO MUCH of our society. Much of the most essential software in the world was written for absolutely free. These days there's lots of open source that is written for corporate PR, but that wasn't always the case.
So, just be careful. Products and services really might be labors of love. We need to leave a tiny gap in our cynicism to allow for some goodness to come in. :)
I also care about privacy. Yes, you have to hand over id to your landlord when you apply for a lease. But unless you can afford to buy your home with cash, you also have to do that to get a mortgage.
I hope my bike share program isn’t selling my trip data to other companies. I would like it if it worked more like public transport, where you can easily buy a ticket without id and use it anonymously.
There’s nothing inherent about renting that prevents privacy. You can buy cars that have gps trackers on them, which can be tracked by a company in the event of theft. Some cars, like the Nissan GT-R, use them to stop you driving too fast if you’re not at an approved race track.
I think regulation is the only way to protect privacy, regardless of whether people rent or own.
I can't see why this necessitates me not owning clothes, or allowing random strangers to use my living room while I'm out, though. I don't even really see the economic utility in either of those cases.
- You do not own media (music, movies, books to some extent).
- You do not own the device (in the sense that you can readily program it).
- You may not repair the devices you use.
- They are all listening to you.
Lack of privacy however, is a lack of personhood. It will be eroded, and some aspects of it should change, nudity for example should be less abhorrent to all. But this seems like a thought experiment for the sake of argument, and I fear that arguments are all it will generate.
Science fiction, right there.
It can also go the opposite direction. Air is free right now, but then see the movies Total Recall and The Lorax (not joking).
When you start off with this, the rest is understandable. That's the hard part.
Africa has been struggling with building roads for possibly millenia. Still struggling today. Will struggle for the next few centuries I gather[0]. And yet, if you live in a huge metro, the idea that something as ubiquitous as tar and paving would be cause for struggle is nothing short of absurd
India is one if the fastest growing developing countries and yet, close to 50% of people still burn biomass to meet their energy requirements[1]
[0]-https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/september-2002/bui...
[1](https://earthjournalism.net/stories/millions-die-as-most-ind...)
BS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Auken
This article is rich coming from a bureaucrat with a guaranteed salary and pension[0]. It's infuriating having to endure these asinine articles with a blatant disregard for basic economy and its central tenet: resources are scarce. Everything's free in their fantasy land, and they never see how that could be abused. I guarantee you they won't be living like that.
[0]https://www.thedanishparliament.dk/en/members/remuneration-a...
A substantial part of the article rests on this premise, and it ain't gonna happen, because if it did, someone would use it all in order to get ahead of everyone else. Sorry abt that, welcome back with a new suggestion (some kind of quota system maybe).
>Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends
Whose bike, again?
The narrative:
- Blame covid, not the bad policy that set the world in this direction (bc then the "elites" might be held accountable for their bad policy). Note that they were preparing for the downturn into 2030 back in as late as 2016 - the WEF "elites" have seen this coming for a while, and covid is an opportunity to aggressively push the narrative.
- The changes will be for the better, particularly for your quality of life. Except things are getting worse for the average person. The WEF "elites" are trying to sell blissful ignorance.
Even McKinsey is getting in on the act:
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector...
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insight...
A) All housing is owned by individuals. Some people own the housing they live in, and pay the maintenance for their housing. Some people are landlords who own more housing than they need and collect rent, while other people don’t own their housing and need to pay that rent. To move up the “housing/economic ladder” you need to save up for a downpayment on a house, and then get a giant (for many people, life-defining) mortgage to do it, and many people never will be able to do it. This is roughly the world we (at least America, I know Germany is different).
B) All housing is owned by publicly traded REITs. Some people own an amount of REIT shares equal to the housing they consume (rented from the same RIETs) , such that (Dividends from REITs - Rent To REITs) is equivalent to the maintenance costs they would have paid. The “Landlords” make more from dividends than the rent they pay, and the “renters” own no equity. To move up the “housing/economic ladder” people simply buy shares of the REITs. Building up ‘your fair share’ of equity is a equally life-defining economic task, and many people never will be able to do it.
If the wealth inequality in worlds A,B are the same, is world B actually any worse? What’s the difference between spending 50% of your income to rent a shitty apartment owned by a slumlord vs. spending 50% of your income renting from the REIT, which is in turn owned by the “equity slumlord”? If you rent your car, but own “one cars worth” of shares in Zipcar, are you worse off than if you own your car? Conversely, “The sharing economy” is just a "rent-a-center" economy if only a few people own the things being "shared".
What is the economy of this world? Who owns the apartment that the “Narrator” is living in? The government? The “Generalized REITs” of world (B)? Mysteriously benevolent rich people? They say “our city” but what does The Narrator do(or own) to merit living in he city more than the people “in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages”
Am I missing something here or does the author dodge all of this?
"""
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young
"""
I think it actually incentivize the opposite.
Where people show each other simple respect regardless of the color of their skin, their gender, and their personal beliefs that do not infringe on the reasonable rights of others? Where weapons in any form are left at the gate?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/us/free-public-transit.ht...
It might not happen everywhere but I do suspect that a number of cities (like the ones already listed here https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/02/free-public-transportation-i...) will continue to push that direction.
Not sure about the other things in the OP, but it's worth considering one aspect of daily life that seems more and more likely as time goes on.
Sharing is fine as long as ownership is not gone.
Owning things has advantages beyond accumulating wealth.
As usual they're missing: - Who does all that work, and why? Someone must be incentivised to clear that living room between his lounging and the business meetings. - Who decides what stuff you get to use? Oh there's no shopping huh. Great. Everything you rent is just perfect for you? Well who makes sure of that? The AI? So your will is what? A calculation? - The fallacious idea of "Privacy is not a necessary cause I'm not doing anything wrong" except that everyone is, all the time. No system of rules has ever had enough gray areas, and most of the victims of invaded privacy are normal people not doing anything extreme.
I realise this is an article meant as a talking point start. I just find this style of typical communist/rousseau utopia very tiresome. It's so incredibly dehumanised and boring.
Sorry for the rant.
I own nothing.
I have no privacy.
I am miserable.
All that becoming "free" (here meaning "at no cost") will never happen in a capitalistic society such as many of ours. So from that point on it is pure fiction.
Expand on that and you're at what the author is describing.
I personally wouldn't bet money on "this will never happen", would you?
Nothing is really at no cost. It is paid for with tax money or directly. The author is not specifying "for those who could not otherwise afford it", but describing it as at no cost for everyone. Most universities cost money to enrole and attend. Does your baker give out buns at no cost? Is the grocery store giving away all the food at no cost? Has it all become a service at no cost?
Nope, none of that has happened and it will not happen, as long as everything needs to be a good business in a capitalistic sense. The single person business or small business or any business cannot escape the reality in this system.
Show me that country or even that city please. Show me the social experiment, that tries to get people to work without pay, as long as they have access to "all the things we need in our daily lives". As far as I know, it has never been done. What if you have any extra wish? How will it be supplied, without tracking your every move in such a society? How would different needs be satisfied, everyone having slightly different needs?
So that's why I call it pure fiction. You are welcome to show me that model city, which self-sufficiently makes it happen. I might move there.
The author never specified whether or how things are paid for, but for me personally I am assuming tax money. He also leaves open whether luxury goods/foods are still paid for.
> Show me that country or even that city please. Show me the social experiment, that tries to get people to work without pay, as long as they have access to "all the things we need in our daily lives". As far as I know, it has never been done.
Why are you asking me to show you something I never claimed existed?
I claimed there's places with social security (housing, food) and free public transport (Luxembourg for instance).
> So that's why I call it pure fiction.
Anything that doesn't exist yet is fiction.
It seems that you both misunderstood the article and my comment, then tried to maneuver me into a position where I would defend something nobody ever claimed.
To be fair, the author leaves a lot of things unexplained, so one's imagination is going to fill in the gaps.
Personally I imagined a city where basic necessities are provided for free, but where you have to pay for anything that is a cut above. Greatly expanded social security essentially.
Who needs free housing?
Who gets to decide who needs free housing? Need I remind you that this often comes down to "the poorest" and "some of the richest"? Here in Sweden the latter category in the guise of representatives for labour unions, the leadership of public organisations like the police and similarly positioned people as well as a number of politicians (Margot Wallström being a good example here) have been implicated many times in real estate deals where they get to live for free or close to free in high-value city-central property owned and paid by the unions or the state.
Also, who decides who gets to live where? Who gets to live in those fine old houses facing the park, who gets to live in the dilapidated tenement blocks? What is the deciding factor? Why?
Who pays for those buses and trams?
Who pays for those houses?
In those places in Europe you mention (and where I live) the answer is that local and state taxes pay for those things, social services gets to decide who is eligible for free housing, the waiting lines for other rental properties are extensive (up to 25 years for some locations) while those eligible for free housing are required by law to be provided with such within a few months. This leads to social tension where people see their children being unable to get their own apartment because all available and affordable places are being handed out for free to "eligible" people, paid for by those same parents and children. The "free" public transport is anything but free, it still needs a large amount of funding which often comes out of local taxes, parking fees and permit fees, "congestion taxes" and more of such. Now imagine a situation where everybody decided from one day to the next to forego on their own mode of transport and starts using the "free" public transport and see what happens. What would happen is a severe drop in funding for the "free" public transport combined with a severe overloading of the buses and trams. The disappearance of car-related taxes would necessitate an increase in other taxes to be able to fund that "free" public transport. For this funding to be stable the taxes would need to be of the sort which can not be avoided, anything from property taxes (which would make owning a house more expensive and relegate this to the richer part of society), public utility taxes, something like the Poll Tax which was tried under the Thatcher government, etc. Since these tax raises would end up breaking the budget for "the poorest" there would be a need for another social servant who gets to decide which people are eligible for tax breaks, raising the taxes for the remaining tax payers.
I guess the picture is getting clear now, "free" services generally are anything but free, they just end up being paid in a different way.
Now turn the thing around and take some of its assumptions as being close to the truth. Nuclear energy, either in the form of fission or fusion, finally gets to live up to the promise of being close to free. There will still be transport costs - where I live I pay more for getting electricity to my home than for the electricity itself, this due to the network being a natural monopoly while I can shop around (on a rigged market, but still) for electricity sellers - but the price should go down markedly. Assuming that my purchasing power remains the same or goes up this means that I now have money left over. What do you think those "car" services will end up costing compared to owning an old but serviceable electric vehicle? Remember that one of the advantages of electric propulsion is its simplicity and with that its longevity (apart from the batteries, that is). If power were to be close to free I would get myself an old electric clunker and use that, especially given that I live in the countryside.
...or does this Utopia not hold with people living outside of cities? Maybe only "important" people are allowed to live outside of the panopticon?
I rebuilt and extended my own house and will probably build some for my children as well using locally sourced (as in taken from my own forest) wood as a building material plus whatever else I need, also locally sourced. I'm in the process of putting solar panels on the barn I built last year, this should make us a net electricity producer in summer. I have yet to decide what to do with the excess electricity, either deliver it to the 'net (which might not be willing to take it), use it it a different way or store it as heat in an insulated underground water basin from where it can be extracted as heat using a heat pump. Would I be allowed to opt out of the state-provided housing and consumption facilities in this Utopia? Would my children be allowed to live in the countryside if wanted to, maybe after having lived in or in proximity to a city for a few years like I did?
No, this is not a vision of the future. It is the preface to yet another dystopic novel where the thing which was supposed to make everybody happy ended up in yet another brave new world. In this vision people are supposed to be happy consumers, consuming their way through life. They'll probably end up as fertiliser for the crops eaten by the next generation, she just did not get around to writing that part yet.
It can be both.
I'm not sure what to do with your response if I'm being honest. It reads like a blog post with your thoughts on the original article, not on anything being discussed in this thread specifically.