What is your take on transhumanism?

But, doesn't someone have to pay for it to be worth producing?

That is, the company that makes the cheap products.

The problem with a post-scarcity economy is that you're dominated by a select few companies who run the automation that gives you basic sustenance, and the equally few people with the knowledge to fix that automation when it breaks. For all practical purposes, they now own you. Look up mining towns and see how well it works when a company controls your basic needs.

The problem with body enhancements is the same as with the no-sleeping thing. Once they're out there, people who can't afford or don't want those enhancements get flushed out of the labor market because they're not competitive workers. You're basically saying "stick a ton of invasive shit in your body or starve".

edited 26th Jul '12 10:04:30 AM by Pykrete

Yeah, if there are companies that can impose artificial scarcity then it is hopeless to try to create a viable post-scarcity economy. Yet another reason why patents are evil

edited 26th Jul '12 10:12:28 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Who wants to bet that the first practical use of cyborgs in the classic sense will be funded by DARPA, with volunteers coming from the ranks of those maimed in Afghanistan/Iraq? They already have high-tech replacement limbs, well, high-tech in the sense of newer materials than the old wooden/aluminium stuff, but they have no connection to the central nervous system.

Hooking them up so that a full range of haptic sensations is available would be the next step.

Sounds like a reasonable prediction.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

You don't get it, do you? Once enhancements are out, people who don't have them will be flushed out of the market because thy won't be competitive enough. If companies are expecting their workers to work 24 hrs on modavinil, you are not getting a job by refusing to do the same. Companies who do hire you will be out-competed. Even without modavinil factories in China are working their workers 12-14 hrs a day. From memory California actually pass a law to ban companies from forcing their employees into getting implants for ID purposes. Businesses can get that bad. Implants for ID doesn't exactly make a company much more competitive though: governments can't do the same thing for enhancements like no sleep drugs because it puts their businesses at a disadvantage and forces businesses overseas to place that allow it. Think how manufacturing has moved out of the US to China.

tldr: when everyone are sad little wage slaves who does nothing but spooge around the office and you don't, you get kicked out for being lazy. And companies who don't will get kicked out by the market because they are not competitive enough. You either work as hard, or you don't have a job (and maybe starve, depending on the welfare). It will be exactly like a college degree: either get one or have no (good) work prospects.

edited 26th Jul '12 2:18:27 PM by IraTheSquire

Honestly if we get to the point where we can automate everything, communism is a self-evidently good idea. Does anyone agree with me? :/

I vowed, and so did you: Beyond this wall- we would make it through.

I think there are better things to spend money on, but that's true of 98% of cool stuff.

Likes many underrated webcomics

I'm not sure if America actually has an unemployment problem as we seem to envision it. It has more of an employer entitlement problem where they expect people to have university degrees and work for 2 bucks an hour. They aren't willing to train/hire local Americans to do the jobs that already exist and those jobs can't even be outsourced (such as nursing), so it's just plain stupid.

As for allowing the Chinese to work longer, I don't know how much it matters. People not sleeping doesn't increase demand so if you give jobs to less people and cause a demand crash, there's nobody buying your extra supply.

That's true in the long term, but given that 1) China has a vast population so such effects will take a long(er) time to have an impact and 2) businesses don't exactly have much foresight to see that kind of thing happening until it is too late (or else no one will be lending to people who can't pay it back and avert one of the reasons for the GFC 2008), so businesses I'll still do it, even if it is probably one of the dumbest things to do in the long run.

So basically, 24 hr work will happen, and it will cause a crash, and then governments around the world might go "Ok, this is really dumb. Let's ban it", or not.

edited 26th Jul '12 3:39:53 PM by IraTheSquire

Well one of my personal goals of transhumanism on the government end was to lower administrative costs in managing services to the point where we can return the control of certain goods back to government so that they can provide it in an optimal way. The AI socialist dictatorship.

Market pricing only exists because we have no better way of distributing goods right now.

Fair. Just saying that with the current model that's what transhumanism will get us into. What happens after there's no way to say.

^ But we're dangerously close to falling into Gattaca logic. That we'll be too stupid to not see these things coming.

Bush outlawed genetic discrimination 10 years ago, long before the era of Gattaca itself so what makes you think governments won't see such things coming and preempt them?

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Because not all governments are moral/smart? All it takes is one government and one company to do it, and the rest will eventually have to follow because they have to compete with that one company. For that to work ALL governments from ALL countries have to do it at the same time. What makes you think that can happen? Did China ban genetic discrimination? Did any African country? If US and some countries ban no sleep pills, business will just go to places that don't, and you're back to square one.

Even now, not all countries have minimum wages and minimum working conditions by law, and we can see the effects: manufacturing is leaving countries with minimum wages and to places without.

edited 26th Jul '12 4:50:06 PM by IraTheSquire

That's more of a problem with how we manage our businesses. The irony is that if people invested here and made things work here, it wouldn't actually be cheaper to ship off jobs to these low wage countries. It's the Greek problem. They just couldn't see the long-term gain of using machines over using manual slave labour.

We're stuck in the same rutt. Canadian labour hours produce enough GDP to cover the high cost of the workers but it's too easy to just say "screw it" and ship the jobs off into low-wage America and just treat your workers poorly even if the productivity per hour of work drops considerably.

Whoever invests the money to promote their industry so that the productivity is worth the wage cost wins, not the person driving themselves to the bottom.

The thing is: modafinil at the same time also rejuvenates your concentration and making you more productive. This is why students are taking them, right now.

edited 26th Jul '12 4:58:10 PM by IraTheSquire

Uhh since when did trade options like tariffs become woefully obsolete and no longer used? Historically such shit has always happened to those who drove to the bottom of the wage ranks and became the most competitive by cost factors alone. (The US was heavily tariffed in Europe and vice versa around 1900. Japan in the 1950s. China today is getting the protectionist stick smacked on their hands little by little.)

Not necessarily. All it takes is a few leaders (usually superpowers) and it becomes the de facto standard and expectation.

All in all, you're approaching the subject like a raving idiotNote

rather than thinking like a politician and business. If a country bans a business that uses 24/7 labor and the country in question is the company's most major market, the company loses. It's why China is basically on the US' leash economically speaking. An embargo on Chinese goods sends them right back to the peasant farmer days of the 1930s. (And the damage to US markets is rather limited since the companies that work in China will go elsewhere or appease their main markets.)

Same thing will happen to transhumanism slavery at the economic level. If the Chinese implement requirements that everyone works 24/7 and the US counters it with bans of the requirements and embargoes Chinese goods, the Chinese (and the companies trying to go there) lose.

edited 26th Jul '12 5:03:38 PM by MajorTom

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

The thing is though: I'm not seeing much improvement in Foxconn or other Chinese factory, despite all the tariffs that US imposes on China. Yeah, sure, they did more inspections and stuff, but the factories are more doing a Happiness Is Mandatory thing rather than making sure that the workers are comfortable. And the reason why manufacturing is moving out of China because there are cheaper labour with even less laws in other countries.

And I really doubt that China would go back to the days of 1930s with an embargo: it's population is big enough to internal consumption that should last for quite a while.

Their economy is wholly dependent on the export market. (Especially to the US.) Take that away and their entire economy folds like a House Of Cards.

Same thing would happen to any country trying to make slaves out of transhuman people into 24/7 busybodies. They all fail in the end.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

It's more likely that the Chinese themselves won't allow that type of labour activity to go on. They have trade deals across the world for raw resources to feed their manufacturing empire and while an embargo from the USA will hurt them significantly, the Chinese are likely to adapt by trading with other countries. They won't reach American levels of luxury but they won't be in peasant-farmer era poverty either.

There are plenty of countries with labour laws much worse than China.

The real issue of transhumanism to me is whether or not the per capita energy consumption goes up without a way to compensate for it. There's a maximum amount of energy you can draw from the environment and I'm concerned that super-transhumans require so much energy there is a major limit on population size.

edited 26th Jul '12 5:25:29 PM by breadloaf

Like who? They can't afford a loss of 300+ million people with First World purchasing power.

They're already tapped in as far as they can go as far as new markets are concerned. (Consequence of being eager to please international/multinational companies who long ago established themselves in said new markets.)

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

From what I can tell, China's exports to USA is about 400 billion USD (and about 100 billion in imports). Their trade with Canada was something like 10 billion, Germany was 200 billion, India was 60 billion. China would get mashed by loss of trade with USA but it does appear that South America, Mideast and Africa combined may be able to mitigate the 400 billion dollar trade loss.

Also USA might be screwed when they lose access to key raw materials from China such as rare earth minerals.

I think the better solution is... hmm... probably something along the lines of internal promotion of GDP per labour hour. I prefer crown corporations as a solution to promote better production. Unions can be ignored and corporations are notoriously short-sighted, it's left to government to take up the slack.

And would the big pharma companies who develop those drugs be sitting on their asses and do nothing while the government is practically trying to ban people from using their products?

Even if they're not enforcing artificial scarcity to prop up a market, they're still in direct control of the supply and can cut it off to whoever they feel like.

"Ooh, you've got some ideas we don't like. Enjoy not eating."

Bump.

MIA