One thousand years from now

I solved a lot of pesky problems during my sleeping times. The trick is to be able to remember after you wake up.

/BAH

The premise of the thought experiment is a very high level of automation - "1000 years from now". UPS, FedEx, DHL all use existing high levels of automation to route and account for packages; it's just a matter of extending the principle.

Ditto mining.

-- Les Cargill

A similarly surprising number of people have benefitted from education, science, infrastructure, public health, defense, public services, and legal protections, but pretend they achieved and invented everything all by themselves, and resent contributing to the upkeep of those things.

There is politically-motivated government waste, which should be discouraged. But the USA is still a lot better off than Botswana.

John

Apart from the ones that explode either on launch or reentry. The mission fatality rate for the shuttle isn't very good. Being blown apart is neither survivable nor without sudden and serious discomfort.

Shuttle I think is around 3g whereas Apollo moon missions reentry peak was ~7g.

Regards, Martin Brown

Individuals can stumble onto different ways of doing things, and other people can observe and copy. That's another evolution.

I think that most people are actually productive for a few hours per day. So cuts in workday from, say, 8 to 6 don't seriously reduce productivity.

Services.

John

The Communists showed a remarkable lack of imagination. They forgot to account for engineers.

John

Actually, I do. Some pretty detailed processing is going on in background, without apparent effort... which is great, considering how lazy I am. The answers are delivered in the morning, usually during my shower.

A lot of inventing and checking and debugging happens in background. Makes you suspect that conscious reasoning is over-rated.

John

Except the two shuttles full of people who didn't.

John

Sure. That's one aspect of network effects.

The other two-plus hours are used for what economists call "signaling", used for maintenance of the "dog pack" that is the firm. This comes directly out of the value provided by the firm, at the customer's expense.

Taken to its logical conclusion, you get something like Enron or Bear-Stearns.

That's the story. We'll see how it pans out. People are figuring out they don't need services, unless the price exceeds cost by a wide margin. Services optimize faster than goods, and encourage rent-seeking.

-- Les Cargill

Then maybe a 99% freeloader population isn't such a great idea, maybe?

Thanks, Rich

The banks that weren't betting on the bubble seem to be doing OK.

Thanks, Rich

You guys have really missed the point, and by quite a wide margin. But it's pretty clear from this thread that we won't have to worry about it - the social norms will make sure everybody is working as inefficiently as possible. Because that's better than freeloading, right?

-- Les Cargill

A thousand years? Try 150. Think back to what civilization was like 1000 years ago and ask yourself whether they would have had ANY DREAM of what today would have been like. I guarantee you that what the world will look like 1000 years from now will be dominated by things we cannot even guess.

PD

Certainly. Freeloaders vote. When there the number of freeloaders exceeds the number of workers, society falls apart. We're about there.

Mostly, the small and regional banks are OK. The banks that decided that they were still banks and not investment firms, are OK. Of course the collapse cause by the rest has hurt them, but they're still afloat.

great.

Really?? The surface of the earth in not infinite. The volume of the earth is not infinite. The total daily solar flux is not infinite. QED the resources of this planet are NOT infinite. They are not even a piss poor approximation. Take a hard look at known coal and oil reserves and current annual use rates. How long until your kids run out?

It's good to know that the schadenfreude reflex is still is working order.

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Sir Issac Newton.

-- Les Cargill

Really.

In mathematical sense - they are not. In practical sense - they are. Amount of resources available is not the limiting factor for the humans.

Oil - 50+ years Coal - 140+ years. Nuclear fission - 300+ years

I would like for my kids to live 150+ years, but I seriously doubt it will happen. So no, my kids will not run out of oil or coal, or anything else for that matter.

=== In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed. ===

You may die in car accident too. It is not a good enough reason not to drive a car.