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Comment by flyinRyan | Hacker News Reader

>as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society.

Wow, that's frustrating. It's not communist, it's post scarcity! Why on earth would we still have capitalism (i.e. a system for allocating finite resources) when resources are unlimited? Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money?

Communism, in contrast, is a different approach to dealing with finite resources. That is, if all resources were infinite we wouldn't need communism either.

Otherwise the article looks good, but I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order.

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Startrek has huge resources, but not infinite. We (in western Europe and north America) reached a point of sufficient resources around 1970. Yet we still have homeless starving on our streets while the 1% who own 90% of the resources cruise around in their super yachts. If we continue this broken system then by the 24th century a typical 1%er might own 30 planets, a fleet of starships and a dilithium crystal mine, but I don't see why he would be anymore willing to share this hoarded wealth with the rest of humanity than the 1%ers of today are.

Indeed, the political resistance to welfare systems in the USA has always saddened me. It seems to me that at a certain point, a post-industrial first-world country has exactly two ways to continue its ascendance and raise the quality of life for its citizens: You can expand in an imperialist fashion (see: Britain in the 19th century, USA in the early 20th century, Germany in the late 1930's in dramatic fashion). Or you can become a welfare state (see: Germany post-WWII, Sweden, France).

The USA has a cultural heritage of expansionism. In the 1850's, losing everything was no biggie, you just moved to California and started digging. In the 1940's, losing everything was no biggie, you just joined the army and shipped out for the Philippines. But by the 1960's when imperialism more or less became untenable (see: the entirety of Africa), there were no more safety nets. America continued in its headstrong belief that no man needs charity, that hard work will provide opportunities for anyone who looks.

The rich always want to be richer. There's two things to do when a first-world country exhausts its own easily-exploitable resources: acquire more resources by force, or redistribute wealth. Otherwise the rich will exploit the only remaining source of wealth which is a country's middle-class.

30 planets and only one dilithium mine? I'd be having a stern talk with the procurement agent over that!

>Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money?

Anything? I can have anything I want? My own personal Tal Mahal? One for all my friends? How about a full-size replica of Jupiter? Oh, and I's really love a Dyson sphere for Christmas.

Our current capabilities are immensely greater than anything dreamed up during neolithic times, but we're still unsatisfied. There is no reason to believe that further technological progress will change that condition.

These are some pretty silly examples. What would you do with another Jupiter? Do you really think that 100 years from now the 1% will be devoting all their resources to buying their own Jupiter?

There are still lots of reasons we need capitalism. As long as humanity has to clean toilets and take out the trash there will be people who will be willing to pay to not have to do that. But at some point we will have illuminated every single one of those tasks. At that point the gain we get from the rat race vs what it costs us will flip and people will be ready to trash the system. We're not there by a long shot even if people from centuries ago would have thought we are. I'm not saying this will happen in my lifetime or the lifetime of my great grand kids. But I'm confident it will happen eventually.

> I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order

Post-scarcity doesn't happen all at once, it happens to different resources at different times.

There are a huge number of us slogging into the office for IP as well as the challenge of erecting artificial barriers in front of newly non-scarce resources in order to extract profit by imposing artificial scarcity on them.

So I have my doubts that the revolution would arrive in "short order" although I'm optimistic enough to believe it would arrive sooner or later.

This seems way off topic but too fun not to discuss

Even in a world with replicators someone gets the penthouse, someone else gets the first floor. Someone gets the 1br apartment in Detroit. Someone else gets the beachfront mansion.

That's just one example of the things a replicator will not make less scarce.

Another is people's time. Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces.

> Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces.

Why would you like to make a next CoD? Because you think it's fun and many people would enjoy it. You know they want it. There are likely to be more than 200 talented people wanting to take part in making this game. For fun, because they like the idea, they want the game to be made.

In post-scarcity society you and others won't have much extrinsic motivators; the intrinsic ones would run the society.

what would you be buying with money?

Services. Goods aren't the only resource one pays for. Peoples time and energy will still be scares.

Services can be exchanged without money and interchangeably between goods as well.

I do this regularly. I rebuilt someone's Windows machine the other day in exchange for the fruit trees in my garden being pruned.

That's not post-scarcity. That is inefficiency. And it is still capitalism. Money is a bookkeeping system for IOUs, not an economic operating structure.

It's a barter/trade system, not capitalism.

Capitalism is primarily about generating profit, and there's no profit without money.

It all went downhill after the Enclosure Acts.

Even under barter and trade, there is profit. To go with the GP's example, one persona valued having his trees pruned more than he valued the time he spent upgrading the computer, and vice versa. Both parties profited and ended up better off or else they wouldn't have made the trade.

The lack of money involved just makes it potentially less efficient if the trade isn't well balanced, or potentially more efficient if they can avoid the friction of the taxman by avoiding money.

This works only if the two nodes in the network have exact matching needs/abilities. This is rare even in small groups.

If you will, money is a message is a message passing protocol. I don't care what's on the other side and how the message (money) was generated - all I care is that I received a message (money) and then I sent other messages (money) to other actors in the network (obviously I sent back something in exchange and so do the other nodes). Then they generated their messages and so on. This way all I need to know are the nodes immediate to me to work it out. I don't care how complex the message graph becomes, it's all irrelevant to me and to others as well. If you don't have that then you have to broadcast all that you offer and all that you need and somehow create the graph to work it out all out. Money is a cheap way of abstracting all that.

What services? Services are generally things people want done but don't want to or can't do themselves. In a star trek world I would expect these things that are still relevant (e.g. tax support services and the like obviously wouldn't exist anymore) would be handled by robots, which themselves are made by the replicators.

There would still be things to do of course. But they would be things that people want to do and wouldn't need to charge for since they no longer have rent or food/utility bills to pay.

People who want to join and can qualify for Starfleet Academy (and less whimsical occupations) will be in relatively short supply.

What about entertainment?

Right now, if we look at just music, there are some people in music because they love it and it's their life. There are many more people who are there because if they make it they'll have insane amounts of money. But pretty much no one can do it for free because everyone has to buy food.

If there were no more money and no more bartering, only the first group would stay in music and they wouldn't need to be paid for it because they wouldn't need money.

I expect things like real TV would go away because that kind of stuff is mostly to push advertisement and without money what would you be advertising?

Why on earth would we still have capitalism (i.e. a system for allocating finite resources) when resources are unlimited?

The same damn reason we still have capitalism now, when industrial productivity keeps rising to all-time highs each year! Because some people view human life as a competition for hierarchical rank, and believe so strongly in that vision that they impose it on the rest of us.

marshall brain's "manna: two visions of humanity's future" does a good job of exploring this problem.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Wow that was really interesting!

Except for being one of the worst-written pieces of science fiction I've ever read in my life, yes. And by "worst-written", I mean that even its so-called "utopia" is in fact a totalitarian state.

oh it has no real literary qualities - it might as well have been written as a counter-factual world history piece. But the idea it contains is interesting. Unrealistic (given current tech), but interesting.

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