Since the tech of science fiction tends to be more realistic than its social science, I am especially interested in science fiction praised for its social realism. Alas I usually find even those wanting. The latest such book is
I don't think there are any old-school, get-the-damn-science right, science fiction authors of the same calibre who invented the Alderson Drive with attached math, or worked out all their planetary orbits and corresponding climates before they started building aliens, who know and write about economics. The SF authors writing about economics are just not of that calibre; they are fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, learn-from-a-blog-post writers, at least when it comes to economics.
I assume that if everyone hibernates, then there will be lowered interest rates. But couldn't they simply let the robots build utopia and wait in hiberantion for it to be ready?
How will the economy grow while all humans are in hibernation and robots only having orders to restock and nothing more? It wouldn't make sense to charge interest over that time and even if you did everyone and their grandma would use it so it just results in massive inflation.
A thought - in a universe with near-perfect hibernation tech, what happens to interest rates? Why not sleep for centuries until your accumulated capital raises you to the plutocracy?
How would they do that with the limitation of light speed, then again the author does assume political unity and waves of immigrants as well... Apparently people are very patient in that universe (though it probably helps that they hibernate so much).
Just as the lockstep society had humans to keep motivation and robots to get stuff done, given your assumptions an em society could use mostly unmodified ems to keep the motivation, and modified ems to get stuff done. And that em society should easily outcompete and out-grow the lockstep society.
Can you tell us which books you have found realistic from the point of view of social science?
I haven't read much science fiction since my teenage years exactly because I find it so irritating that most scifi writers' vision of the future is basically the current world with all the same power structures and social constructions but with flying cars, plasma pistols and space travel.
"Why do they keep crashing? Apparently because you need real flesh humans to have real motivations; without human flesh you forget why anything matters. Really. Sigh."
This might not be likely, but it seems plausible enough to base a science fiction story around. Human minds have evolved over a very long time and a wide range of conditions, a history that favors high stability and reliability. Assume AI tech allows the creation of super-human minds, but their designs are highly complex and ultimately unpredictable. Not unlike the experience contemporary humans face when designing computer software.
Unlike present day software, a mis-specified super-AI is a lot more dangerous. It can outwit the debuggers who try to kill it. So it's easy to imagine a situation where AI designers keep trying to push the threshold to outcompete local competitors until they hit a bug and destroy everything in the neighborhood. (Not unlike Yudkosky's example of a super-AI running a paperclip factory that converts the entire solar system to paperclips).
Of course, you might counter that highly sped up EMs offer human stability and super-human intelligence. But even that might not be the case. A brain consists of a lot of processing overhead not needed for an EM, like the entire brain stem. Once EMs are around the temptation might be to hack EMs to remove needless functionality. Hacked EMs might create the same performance-stability tradeoff equilibrium as super-AI.
"Neither he nor the narrator seem much concerned that this might destroy whatever has prevented this empire from not crashing."
I don't believe civilizations are as fragile as in the book, but when it's the premise one should indeed be careful not too uproot everything at once.
In any case it's impossible to do accurate forecasting on the far future (more than a century into the future). The whole of human psychology may change as a result of an EM transition or artificial enhancements and changes to the human body, meaning we can't say much about far future economics, religion and politics.
How about we look into the near future when human psychology is still the same as it is now and economics are still the same or only transitioning to something else. How will humans deal with the threat of a genetic divide for example? Will a world government arise? Etc...
I don't think there are any old-school, get-the-damn-science right, science fiction authors of the same calibre who invented the Alderson Drive with attached math, or worked out all their planetary orbits and corresponding climates before they started building aliens, who know and write about economics. The SF authors writing about economics are just not of that calibre; they are fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, learn-from-a-blog-post writers, at least when it comes to economics.
They could. but the premise is that they don't (because somehow even with all their technology it's just not sustainable).
I assume that if everyone hibernates, then there will be lowered interest rates. But couldn't they simply let the robots build utopia and wait in hiberantion for it to be ready?
How will the economy grow while all humans are in hibernation and robots only having orders to restock and nothing more? It wouldn't make sense to charge interest over that time and even if you did everyone and their grandma would use it so it just results in massive inflation.
A thought - in a universe with near-perfect hibernation tech, what happens to interest rates? Why not sleep for centuries until your accumulated capital raises you to the plutocracy?
How would they do that with the limitation of light speed, then again the author does assume political unity and waves of immigrants as well... Apparently people are very patient in that universe (though it probably helps that they hibernate so much).
Apparently not.
Do none of the fast civilisations want to invade the Lockstep?
New intelligences and psychologies would still be limited by Darwinian pressures under nearly all circumstances...we know that much...
http://www.overcomingbias.c...
Just as the lockstep society had humans to keep motivation and robots to get stuff done, given your assumptions an em society could use mostly unmodified ems to keep the motivation, and modified ems to get stuff done. And that em society should easily outcompete and out-grow the lockstep society.
Can you tell us which books you have found realistic from the point of view of social science?
I haven't read much science fiction since my teenage years exactly because I find it so irritating that most scifi writers' vision of the future is basically the current world with all the same power structures and social constructions but with flying cars, plasma pistols and space travel.
"Why do they keep crashing? Apparently because you need real flesh humans to have real motivations; without human flesh you forget why anything matters. Really. Sigh."
This might not be likely, but it seems plausible enough to base a science fiction story around. Human minds have evolved over a very long time and a wide range of conditions, a history that favors high stability and reliability. Assume AI tech allows the creation of super-human minds, but their designs are highly complex and ultimately unpredictable. Not unlike the experience contemporary humans face when designing computer software.
Unlike present day software, a mis-specified super-AI is a lot more dangerous. It can outwit the debuggers who try to kill it. So it's easy to imagine a situation where AI designers keep trying to push the threshold to outcompete local competitors until they hit a bug and destroy everything in the neighborhood. (Not unlike Yudkosky's example of a super-AI running a paperclip factory that converts the entire solar system to paperclips).
Of course, you might counter that highly sped up EMs offer human stability and super-human intelligence. But even that might not be the case. A brain consists of a lot of processing overhead not needed for an EM, like the entire brain stem. Once EMs are around the temptation might be to hack EMs to remove needless functionality. Hacked EMs might create the same performance-stability tradeoff equilibrium as super-AI.
Almost yeah. You'd have to make so many assumptions for any one scenario that it's almost like guessing.
What is your threshold for "accurate"? That is, do you mean to say it is impossible to predict anything better than would a random forecast?
"Neither he nor the narrator seem much concerned that this might destroy whatever has prevented this empire from not crashing."
I don't believe civilizations are as fragile as in the book, but when it's the premise one should indeed be careful not too uproot everything at once.
In any case it's impossible to do accurate forecasting on the far future (more than a century into the future). The whole of human psychology may change as a result of an EM transition or artificial enhancements and changes to the human body, meaning we can't say much about far future economics, religion and politics.
How about we look into the near future when human psychology is still the same as it is now and economics are still the same or only transitioning to something else. How will humans deal with the threat of a genetic divide for example? Will a world government arise? Etc...