zompist's Essay on "Advanced Civs"

[keenir]

We do have to take capitalism into account for short-term prediction -- of course questions about job loss are valid. (As it happens, I don't think AI will cost us jobs; but the question is a perfectly reasonable one.)
For long term, advanced civilization though -- I hope after 10,000 years of industrial civilization you start to figure out something about economics!

Oh, I think we have to figure it out long before then. We either clean up our act in the next 100 years or destroy our civilization.

I never thought I was much of an optimist, but I rather think we have a lot more than a century...we certainly won't be destroying civilizations.

Will some traditional activities become harder to do, if and when the world gets hotter/drier/floodeder, in that century? Certainly so.

Will the people doing those traditional activities suddenly stop existing? Nope. (they might stop doing those activities, but they'll still exist whether they do them or not)

Humans are like flamingos: flamingos have utterly no problems living in hot caustic "soda lakes" and eating microflora...but as anyone who has seen flamingos in zoos or anywhere else in the world, can attest, flamingos have utterly no problems doing without hot caustic water, and can dine on more than just microflora.

Humans have survived lots of enviromental disasters before, and I have no doubt we will continue to do so. Even the Toba erruption couldn't wipe us out, and there were far far fewer of us back then.

[WeepingElf]

A cell phone doesn't exactly make you a cyborg, but it seems that people these days are offended if a person doesn't offer immediate and permanent phone access, and organizations routinely assume it— e.g. my gym apparently now requires a phone rather than an ID to enter.

I'm reminded of this, which I found somewhere on the Internet a while ago:

whatpartof4.png

Fine. In my solarpunk setting, there is a growing social movement known as the "analog rights movement" which campaigns for the right to do everyday business in analog ways, such as buying train tickets at the railway station and paying them with cash.

[Raphael]

zompist complained that, when he turned the document we're talking about here into a pdf file, the hyperlinks in it were broken.

A very belated tip for the future: you might have links in pdf files by writing out the actual url of the link, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food . That won't guarantee that people can open the link, but depending on which software they use to look at the pdf, they might be able to.