Reading The Hunger Games (2008) and watching Visioneers (2008) recently reminded me that last year I read We (1921) and Pictures of the Socialistic Future [POTSF] (1891).
One other thing about great dystopian novels-- there are very few of them. Maybe the idea doesn't have that many possibilities, and they got used up early.
When I hear you talk about subsistence living for humans, I imagine a day when Robin Hanson [2XXX version] can finally prove the breakthrough is almost upon us. I predict he gets misquoted in this headline:
"Hanson: Poverty Imminent For All When EM Technology Matures"
... and I wonder how long after that article is published EM Technology gets banned completely.
It makes sense to become foragers at leisure. Humans have been foragers for a lot longer than they have been farmers (at least hundreds of times, more likely thousands). The best foragers likely had neuronal structures optimized to like foraging and for doing it well and for experiencing pleasure when doing foraging well.
In a real sense living organisms can have no “leisure”. It is just practice at optimization of different survival skills.
It makes sense to become foragers at leisure. Humans have been foragers for a lot longer than they have been farmers ;)
One other thing about great dystopian novels-- there are very few of them. Maybe the idea doesn't have that many possibilities, and they got used up early.
We may actually be moving away from the impersonal, efficient style predicted in the past.
ahem, Carlyle. That is all.
When I hear you talk about subsistence living for humans, I imagine a day when Robin Hanson [2XXX version] can finally prove the breakthrough is almost upon us. I predict he gets misquoted in this headline:
"Hanson: Poverty Imminent For All When EM Technology Matures"
... and I wonder how long after that article is published EM Technology gets banned completely.
It makes sense to become foragers at leisure. Humans have been foragers for a lot longer than they have been farmers (at least hundreds of times, more likely thousands). The best foragers likely had neuronal structures optimized to like foraging and for doing it well and for experiencing pleasure when doing foraging well.
In a real sense living organisms can have no “leisure”. It is just practice at optimization of different survival skills.
Are you at all familiar with the novel The World Inside by Robert Silverberg?