From: Alex Ramonsky (alex@ramonsky.com)
Date: Thu Feb 28 2002 - 02:55:56 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Neil Blanch" <neilb@nswcc.org.au>
To: <extropians-digest@extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 06:06
Subject: Re: The economics of Star Trek
[snip]
perhaps a communist-style society that retains real & sustainable
> human rights is only possible once a certain level of technology (most
> importantly energy & material abundance technology) is achieved, and
> furthermore that today's world of capitalism & free markets is only a
short
> term stage in social evolution necessary to achieve the level of
> technological advancement that makes a "free" communist society possible
(&
> desirable). Any thoughts on this?
>
> Neil Blanch
> Stewing in my own pancreatic juices,
> Sydney, Australia
>
I think rather that the level of technological advancement we would like to
achieve can only come through slavery. Humans don't have any time to get
into science and philosophy and art without slavery, because they're too
busy working their asses off to stay alive. Older civilisations used other
humans as slaves. We use machines to do all the messy, boring and dangerous
jobs (like, mucking out the anaconda). We use tech as slave labor in order
to free ourselves to create better tech.
Slaves have a history of revolting. Will we ever hear the cry of "Oh my god!
AI is revolting!"...?
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