Blueprint for a Brighter Future

post by Alex Beyman (alexbeyman) · 2024-07-02T06:15:37.910Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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Presumably our shared goal is to make possible a comfortable and dignified life for the maximum number of people while treading lightly on the environment, balancing individual rights and status seeking behaviors against the common good (with a view to preventing tragedy of the commons). Importantly, any solution to these problems must not require human nature to fundamentally change. Both left and right wing efforts of the 20th century to create a "new man", fit to inhabit their respective notions of utopia, only led to so much butchery.

I instead propose to design society around the human animal in such a way as to soften our rough edges, mainly by meeting everyone's needs and preventing extreme inequality. This won't prevent, say, crimes of passion but it would prevent crimes born of scarcity, such as burglaries, muggings, squatting, carjacking, scams, ransom, etc. It should also make accommodations for people wanting to live different ways, such as those unhappy in the dense living conditions found in urban population centers.

To this end I envision a nationwide network of robotically printed arcologies built atop or adjacent to the ruins of former cities (to make use of existing electrical infrastructure, roads, etc.) reclaimed by nature due to climate disaster. Said arcologies are coated in PV to generate all their own power as well as integrated geothermal (which now works anywhere on Earth thanks to Quaise Energy), linked to neighboring arcologies via enclosed elevated highspeed rail guideways, with PRT, moving walkways and multi-directional ropeless elevators furnishing transport within each structure.

Architecturally the interiors would share qualities of airports, malls and cruise ships, subdivided into units equipped according to their use, with every structure being mixed zone residential, commercial, agricultural (indoor vertical aquaponics) and so on. Mining and manufacturing are remote automated facilities. 

Arcology interiors would be self-cleaning, sterilized of microbial life nightly using far UV modes in light fixtures and provide highly filtered air. Widespread vibration mitigation and soundproofed insulation, as well as special settings for the LED fixtures, would ameliorate sensory issues. Private individual enclosures would exist at all public venues. Clubs for example, where every booth can enjoy its own music without hearing anybody else's.

AI manages everything at the level of individual population centers. The structure of government remains unchanged save for a transparent blockchain based electronic voting system, and potentially an open source emulation of congress & senate with AI representatives to be trialed with mock votes for some years pending eventual replacement of human politicians. Being open source, this software could be downloaded at home so citizens could (should they so desire) attempt to replicate the outcome of votes/hearings, ensuring the system isn't being discreetly puppeteered. 

All essential labor is performed by robots made in factories with parallel assembly lines to produce all the parts for the robots, and for the factory itself, so that the entire facility is self-replicating and makes all the components needed for maintenance of both the factory and the robots. Likewise foundries, refineries and all other industrial infrastructure.

Education is individualized thanks to bespoke content generation AI. Every text contains two differently worded explanations of each concept so that whatever is unclear in explanation A is clarified in explanation B or vice versa. Further explanations from different perceptual angles could be generated on demand, should the two initial ones fail to clarify the topic. There is intentional group socialization at school but education proper takes place in individual soundproofed booths, using VR to eliminate distraction.

A central focus of education post kindergarten is identifying special interest and optimizing the educational track you're on to make the most of it, identifying in advance potential positions in society where it can be leveraged. Prior to that level the main focus is on socialization and teaching fundamental reasoning skills.

A social credit system is implemented to incentivize prosocial behaviors. Surveillance is illegal in private establishments but ubiquitous in public to facilitate AI driven law enforcement which searches footage for the area you indicate a crime transpired after or during the event. This means humans aren't monitoring you until you report a crime, search the footage for that time/place and submit relevant clips. 

Rehabilitation takes the place of punishment, ala the Scandinavian prison model, including the use of empathogens and sensory deprivation chambers for the treatment of empathy deficits.

Economy is functionally post-scarcity with tokens issued in monthly dispensations so as to equitably ration access to robotic production capacity. 

Hard drugs are illegal, everything else is legal and regulated. Ricky’s Law or the equivalent permits law enforcement to abduct homeless addicts and make them go through rehab. Their time in rehab doubles with every subsequent arrest. This law does not apply for persons living independently of arcologies in remote dwellings. 

Theft is reduced to zero or nearly so by removing the economic incentive for theft. Anything anybody else has, to a point, you can simply order manufactured by robots and delivered to you within a week. Sex crimes are reduced by making possible outlets for criminal behaviors of those kinds through a combination of humanoid robotics and sophisticated VR. 

Meat is legal and readily available. Fish, crustaceans and other oceanic fauna are farmed via mariculture on the continental shelf. Chicken, pigs and cows are no longer raised conventionally, their meat is cultured and vat grown. Potentially it could also come from genetically engineered variations on these animals which are born and develop without a brain to avoid inflicting suffering, hooked up to life support and exercised by electrical impulse until maturity.  

MLM and all other types of predatory financial scam are illegal. Cults, and religions demonstrated through court proceedings to be based upon historical falsehoods, invalid epistemology and emotional manipulation are illegal. This does not include prison time but meetings of these kinds of groups are disrupted, members disallowed from holding government positions, homeschooling is disallowed and public education includes lessons in critical thinking / heuristic analysis for identification of fraud, including scams, cults, and religions conforming too closely to the B.I.T.E. model. Repeat offenders are sent to the same re-education camps Christian parents once sent their gay children to (such that we don't need to build new ones). 

Goods are largely made to order in a massively parallelized fashion, to avoid problems with demand prediction, and waste is minimized (as well as demand on public generalized fabrication capacity) with less capable home fabrication (3d printing, home lithography with desktop filament recycling, home aquaponics, etc.) This means much of our clothing and devices would not be branded, but designed by ourselves according to our own particular needs.

This includes private remote dwellings for those unhappy with dense living conditions found in arcologies. This would be aspirational as most of the country outside the arcologies would be rewilded for the sake of reversing environmental damage. So, remote parcels of land would not be free or available to everybody for the asking, but attainable with sufficient contributions of value to society. These dwellings would be energy self-sufficient, food sufficient and 3D printed, with an eVTOL for commuting to the nearest transit network access point. 

Business ownership exists, providing mostly artisanal services you wouldn’t want AI to do, even though it could. You cannot own robots but you may rent them, at rates equivalent to the wages you would pay human workers. This pays into the common support fund while the transition to full automation is underway. 

You can still become very wealthy under this system, you can still own private property, I am not describing a communist society. Many of the assumptions inherent to pre-automation economic systems concerning the nature and scarcity of labor don’t apply once certain technologies mature. The transitional system prior to full automation will most closely resemble social democracy. 

Employment is optional but rewarded with greater access to production capacity (more tokens) and social notoriety (VIP access, desirable land for a private dwelling, etc). Rewards include placement on prestigious projects such as desert reclamation, space exploration/settlement, Antarctic and oceanic colonization/resource development.

More broadly, the near term goal of this society is to attain K level 1 which includes repairing climate damage, expanding human presence in an environmentally responsible way to the now largely ice-free Antarctica as well as populating the continental shelves in service of oceanic farming, power generation (offshore wind/current turbines) and deep sea mining. There should exist lunar outposts for industrial, scientific and military applications, as well as the initial establishment of a permanent colony on Mars.

Beyond that, federal programs will exist to evolve in software human-level AIs and beyond, computing power permitting, for study, to be safely extinguished while still contained if ruled dangerous. These AIs will eventually be introduced into suitable environments in space and granted rights/autonomy with a view to long term collaboration on more ambitious space projects, like O'Neill cylinders and Bernal Spheres at LaGrange points. 

A bioengineering program would run in parallel to find safe improvements to human longevity and intellect, made freely available as an elective family planning service (consumer level CRISPR & germinal selection) with the added bonus of correcting human mutational load increase.

It goes without saying that residency offworld would not be available to anybody and reserved as an aspirational reward for prolific contributors. Likewise an ongoing project of government would be to develop newer (and more) desirable rewards to incentivize productive contribution, such as cloud 9 tensegrity sphere airborne resorts, domed tropical resorts at the poles, and similar exotic vacation destinations near and far. Basically stuff you might desire that you can’t  make for yourself at home or have a remote automated production facility manufacture for you. 

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