From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Sep 27 1999 - 06:36:14 MDT
QueeneMUSE@aol.com writes:
> Creating a nice environment may become the Zenith
> of civilization. Good sounds, good smells, good air, good light, soft
> couches, beauty all around you, robust objets d'art, polite conversation,
> lovemaking and sweet talk... HEY! just what the hell is wrong with
> '"reveling in the present"? Isn't that why we produce, to grab a few
> precious moments of *just that*?
>
> Manicured Aesthetics becoming the focus of life... I like it!
A bit like Aristoi?
> And why do people want to own their own cities, or am I reading this
> wrong... Anders playfully suggested a Muse city, and I go quite
> uncomfortable -- since I have no experience in city planning and
> have seen the botched up jobs of people who *do*...
Probably just the ambient megalomania here :-) Actually, I think few
of us would be able to plan a good city, or even get together enough
people to live in them. Maybe the nanotech world will be littered with
empty cities, the results of people getting creative but having nobody
to live in them (since everybody is making their own city).
In my roleplaying scenario there is a situation just like this: a new
colony planet, colonized by colonists using advanced automation and
AI. There are currently 300 people on the entire planet (and many,
many more AIs), with a grandiose capital and several outlying
settlements, holiday resorts, monuments and an internet with a huge
bandwidth. The AIs simply build more stuff to amuse themselves ("Let's
make a Mount Rushmore out of that mountain range! We can put images
of all the colonists on the rockfaces... hmm, maybe we could carve in
our own source code while we are at it!" "The Mary Infiltration
Project could of course work out of New Stockholm, but why not build
it a base of its own? I'm itching to try out the Stalinist style on
the Northern tundras."). It's rather fun to describe this
"Mega-Brasilia" - empty highways, grandiose gardens, a 400 floor
skyscraper built like an exponential function with just a single
office in use.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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