Future art
Howard Brazee
<msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
>> Your book appeals to a mere one person in a trillion. Royalties
>> are a mere penny a copy. Congratulations--your income is now in
>> the many many trillions of dollars a year.
>
>Though to get that one person in a trillion, you're competing with
>more fellow authors than there are people on Earth now.
In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and education,
there will be lots and lots and lots of very good writers and other
artists. Who will be their audience?
Keith F. Lynch
> In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and
> education, there will be lots and lots and lots of very good
> writers and other artists. Who will be their audience?
I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis of, say,
1980, when at any given moment half the population was watching the
same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
A better question is, with a population of about 10^20 instead of
about 10^10, there will be the equivalent of a Newton, an Einstein,
a Gauss, born not about once per century, but several times per
*second*. What will that be like? For instance would the half-life
of the average major unsolved math problem be less than a second?
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
Nancy Lebovitz
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>> In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and
>> education, there will be lots and lots and lots of very good
>> writers and other artists. Who will be their audience?
I hear that there's almost no pure audience for American poetry--
just about anyone who reads poetry also writes it.
>
>I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
>producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis of, say,
>1980, when at any given moment half the population was watching the
>same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
Finding what you're likely to like might get harder.
The modern amount of art erodes the idea of a canon--it's too hard
to figure out what the best is, or even what "the best" means.
What happens when there's magnitudes more art?
Or when there are more sorts of human nervous systems to make art
for?
>
>A better question is, with a population of about 10^20 instead of
>about 10^10, there will be the equivalent of a Newton, an Einstein,
>a Gauss, born not about once per century, but several times per
>*second*. What will that be like? For instance would the half-life
>of the average major unsolved math problem be less than a second?
How hard is it to find major poblems compared to solving them?
--
Nancy Lebovitz http://www.nancybuttons.com
http://livejournal.com/users/nancylebov
My two favorite colors are "Oooooh" and "SHINY!".
frisbie...@yahoo.com
Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
> > In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and
> > education, there will be lots and lots and lots of very good
> > writers and other artists. Who will be their audience?
>
> I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
> producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis of, say,
> 1980, when at any given moment half the population was watching the
> same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
>
It depends. If communication moves at light speed, then it takes years
to find out what is going on elsewhere, so things would be local and
more or less the same as now. If you have instant communication, then
you would have a supercompetitive situation.
> A better question is, with a population of about 10^20 instead of
> about 10^10, there will be the equivalent of a Newton, an Einstein,
> a Gauss, born not about once per century, but several times per
> *second*. What will that be like? For instance would the half-life
> of the average major unsolved math problem be less than a second?
So we have FTL communication. The greatest mathematician in the
Universe can teach a zillion people. So we have a lot of Gausses as
waiters.
I think the great math problems wouldn't be solved much faster. The
cliche that comes to mind is trying to have a baby in one month by
putting 9 mothers on the job.
David Dyer-Bennet
> A better question is, with a population of about 10^20 instead of
> about 10^10, there will be the equivalent of a Newton, an Einstein,
> a Gauss, born not about once per century, but several times per
> *second*. What will that be like? For instance would the half-life
> of the average major unsolved math problem be less than a second?
And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority among
the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
--
David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd...@dd-b.net>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/>
Pics: <http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/> <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>
David Dyer-Bennet
> I think the great math problems wouldn't be solved much faster. The
> cliche that comes to mind is trying to have a baby in one month by
> putting 9 mothers on the job.
If everybody concentrated on one problem first, it might not get
solved much faster.
You can get 9 babies in 9 months out of 9 women, remember. And we're
talking about the large set of interesting unsolved math problems, not
just *one* problem.
Tim McDaniel
David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
>"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
>
>> A better question is, with a population of about 10^20 instead of
>> about 10^10, there will be the equivalent of a Newton, an Einstein,
>> a Gauss, born not about once per century, but several times per
>> *second*. What will that be like? For instance would the
>> half-life of the average major unsolved math problem be less than a
>> second?
>
>And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority
>among the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
I've wondered about this one: with a space fleet in an Einsteinian
universe, in which frame of reference do you issue paychecks?
--
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tm...@panix.com
Mark Atwood
> > In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and
> > education, there will be lots and lots and lots of very good
> > writers and other artists. Who will be their audience?
>
> I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
> producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis of, say,
> 1980, when at any given moment half the population was watching the
> same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
That's called a "power curve", and the web didnt change the shape
of the curve, it just changed it's parameters.
--
Mark Atwood When you do things right, people won't be sure
m...@mark.atwood.name you've done anything at all.
http://mark.atwood.name/ http://fallenpegasus.livejournal.com/
Nancy Lebovitz
I expect that one to be a matter of custom and negotiation rather than
having an exact answer.
Wayne Throop
:: among the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
On a spherical spinning earth, how do you count dates
for contractual obligations?
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Tim McDaniel <tm...@panix.com> said
One assumes that, by then, 'pay' will have gone the way of the Dodo?
Alternatively, if your employees have relativistic starships under their
control, you pay whatever they ask whenever they ask. 8>. ObSF:
CJC's Alliance/Union series.
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Google may be your friend, but groups.google.com posters definitely aren't.
Midnighter
"David Dyer-Bennet" <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote in message
news:87lktgz...@gw.dd-b.net...
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
>
>> A better question is, with a population of about 10^20 instead of
>> about 10^10, there will be the equivalent of a Newton, an Einstein,
>> a Gauss, born not about once per century, but several times per
>> *second*. What will that be like? For instance would the half-life
>> of the average major unsolved math problem be less than a second?
>
> And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority among
> the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
Wouldn't they be also exponentially finding more problems?
Marilee J. Layman
wrote:
The other writers and artists. You don't think that happens now?
--
Marilee J. Layman
http://mjlayman.livejournal.com/
Keith F. Lynch
> Tim McDaniel <tm...@panix.com> wrote:
>> David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
>>> And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority
>>> among the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
>> I've wondered about this one: with a space fleet in an Einsteinian
>> universe, in which frame of reference do you issue paychecks?
All inertial frames are equally good, so ISO or ANSI or somebody
arbitrarily chooses one as the standard. The one in which the cosmic
microwave background is most nearly isotropic is the obvious choice.
> One assumes that, by then, 'pay' will have gone the way of the Dodo?
Why should that be? What future advances would cause you to be
willing to work for free?
> Alternatively, if your employees have relativistic starships under
> their control, you pay whatever they ask whenever they ask. 8>.
> ObSF: CJC's Alliance/Union series.
It's true if a relativistic starship is crashed at full speed into an
inhabited planet, it will make a hell of a mess. Is that what you're
alluding to? (I haven't read that series.)
Then there was Busby's _All These Earths_, in which the premise is
that FTL travel is possible, but causes you to slip into a parallel
world, perhaps one in which your employer never heard of you, or
doesn't even exist. This makes it challening to recruit starship
crews.
Keith F. Lynch
> Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>> I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
>> producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis
>> of, say, 1980, when at any given moment half the population was
>> watching the same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
> It depends. If communication moves at light speed, then it takes
> years to find out what is going on elsewhere, so things would be
> local and more or less the same as now.
My thesis is that the population of a *solar system* would be 10^20,
roughly the square of the present population, all well within 24 hours
communication of each other. You wouldn't want to try to load a web
page directly from a server on the other side of the solar system, but
with local caching the web should work almsot exactly as it does now,
except instead of there being several billion web pages, there would
be several billion billion. Just imagine if your Google search that
now gets 3 hits instead gets 3 billion.
Usenet and email lists would also work. Instead of about 100,000
newsgroups there would have to be about 100,000,000,000,000 -- unless
you'd like to read, not a few hundred new postings a night, but a few
hundred billion. (That rate of reading might actually be possible
with transhuman enhancements.)
The population of a *galaxy* would be about 10^30. Of course it would
take anywhere from a few years to a few hundred thousand years to
exchange messages with most folks outside your solar system.
(It's worthy of note that we *already* have the technology to exchange
messages with any similarly equipped civilization in the galaxy.)
The population of the *universe* would be about 10^40. Of course it
would take countless eons to exchange messages with most folks outside
your home galaxy.
David Tate
> GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > One assumes that, by then, 'pay' will have gone the way of the Dodo?
>
> Why should that be? What future advances would cause you to be
> willing to work for free?
Is that a serious question? If so, the answer is clearly 'plenty'. As
in enough, surplus, a post-scarcity economy. When you can have enough
of whatever material thing you want just for the taking, there's no
point in being 'paid'.
Humans being humans, there would still no doubt be commerce and
wagering, but for non-tangible stakes.
I already work for free in my second job -- that's called
'volunteering'. If I didn't have to worry about food and shelter and a
steady supply of good books and nice toys, I could work for free at my
first job, too.
David Tate
Keith F. Lynch
> Finding what you're likely to like might get harder.
Or perhaps easier, since there would be vastly more niches.
On rasfw, people sometimes type in a detailed description of a novel
they once read, hoping someone can identify it. Imagine a future in
which they can type in an equally detailed description of a novel
they'd *like* to read, and a search engine will promptly find a
hundred novels which their description matches perfectly.
"I want squids in space *and* snakes on a plane, and the protagonist
must have my name, be my age, and have my hobbies. And there must be
time travel to the years 1517 and 1923, but to no other years."
"About 12,000 matches found. Narrow your search?"
>> For instance would the half-life of the average major unsolved math
>> problem be less than a second?
> How hard is it to find major poblems compared to solving them?
Good point. Instead of the current situation of there being about
a hundred really interesting unsolved math problems with about
one solved a year, there would be about a hundred billion really
interesting unsolved math problems with a couple dozen solved
each second.
David Friedman
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
>
> > A better question is, with a population of about 10^20 instead of
> > about 10^10, there will be the equivalent of a Newton, an Einstein,
> > a Gauss, born not about once per century, but several times per
> > *second*. What will that be like? For instance would the half-life
> > of the average major unsolved math problem be less than a second?
>
> And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority among
> the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
If the award giver is in your forward light cone and nobody else's, you
get the award. Otherwise you split it with everyone else whose forward
light cone he is in.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
David Friedman
"David Tate" <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> > GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > One assumes that, by then, 'pay' will have gone the way of the Dodo?
> >
> > Why should that be? What future advances would cause you to be
> > willing to work for free?
>
> Is that a serious question? If so, the answer is clearly 'plenty'. As
> in enough, surplus, a post-scarcity economy. When you can have enough
> of whatever material thing you want just for the taking, there's no
> point in being 'paid'.
People want non-material things as well.
Wim Lewis
>universe, in which frame of reference do you issue paychecks?
The frame of reference of the issuing bank?
I wonder if an economic system could be developed that's more "Lorentz
invariant". Our current setup is very Newtonian. But I can imagine a
system in which, for example, interest is computed based on "interval",
instead of timelike or spacelike separation, and so on. Then it wouldn't
matter what reference frame your paycheck was in, but it would matter
where it was (presumably either at the local fleet pay office, or at
the bank's central office again).
--
Wim Lewis <wi...@hhhh.org>, Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1
jam...@echeque.com
> > > Why should that be? What future advances would
> > > cause you to be willing to work for free?
> > Is that a serious question? If so, the answer is
> > clearly 'plenty'. As in enough, surplus, a
> > post-scarcity economy. When you can have enough of
> > whatever material thing you want just for the
> > taking, there's no point in being 'paid'.
David Friedman wrote:
> People want non-material things as well.
Indeed, most of the expenditures of the well off are
already non material things - tourism, power boat
lessons, all sorts of stuff that is not exactly stuff.
And some material things are a bit difficult to provide
in unlimited supply, for example houses on top of hills
with near three sixty degree views of ocean, island,
foreshore, hills, and forests.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
K4L2NVI1HaFBjXD//hKgQnA/0NnzNWmDe8u/5pzE
4a5Y/+WGh1x+OnzsMecjQGSuQUwiXPiYMbbZj8JbI
Doug Wickstrom
>And some material things are a bit difficult to provide
>in unlimited supply, for example houses on top of hills
>with near three sixty degree views of ocean, island,
>foreshore, hills, and forests.
All one needs for an infinite supply of those is a good bit of
sailcloth, and a skilled landscape painter.
Or windows with changeable virtual views.
Paul Ciszek
In article <1146906054.4...@j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>
>And some material things are a bit difficult to provide
>in unlimited supply, for example houses on top of hills
>with near three sixty degree views of ocean, island,
>foreshore, hills, and forests.
To have a true "post scarcity economy", we need to make
people scarce.
--
Please reply to: | "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is
pciszek at panix dot com | indistinguishable from malice."
Autoreply is disabled |
htn963
> In article <e3e7j7$3ss$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
> Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> >Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
> >> In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and
> >> education, there will be lots and lots and lots of very good
> >> writers and other artists. Who will be their audience?
Perhaps AI's will be built whose sole function is to consume and
criticize art, a sort of aesthetic welfare system for starving artists.
But in any case, the question doesn't have foundation since there has
been and never will be "lots and lots of very good artists" -- at least
not the kind whose ability to connect to and elevate their fellow human
beings to the point that the oversupply of them will tragically limit
their exposure.
> I hear that there's almost no pure audience for American poetry--
> just about anyone who reads poetry also writes it.
I gather what is meant is "Contemporary American Poetry" -- and
those from across the Atlantic as well. Even then that's an
exaggeration.
But does one have to not write poetry to be a "pure" audience? And
what about those who just dabbles occasionally. Poetry is a short,
accessible art form, easily taken up by most as a form of
self-expression or emotional release, like writing diaries and
journals.
> >I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
> >producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis of, say,
> >1980, when at any given moment half the population was watching the
> >same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
The Balkanization of art through the web would be an interesting
topic for Sfnal speculation -- whether art would have more to gain or
lose by specialization for select audiences than by the old standard of
striving for universal appeal.
So far the web has not produced anything more worthwhile than
low-cost and accessible porn, but if pressed to extremity, one may
argue that usenet exchanges like yours and mine -- and even the
shouting of trolls -- is a new albeit low-grade form of art, akin to
epistolary efforts in their interplay of self-revelevations and
obfuscations, more "concrete" than that of drawing room conversations
by being logged for posterity, but having more "verite" than journals
or blogs by their more spontaneous nature.
> Finding what you're likely to like might get harder.
>
> The modern amount of art erodes the idea of a canon--it's too hard
> to figure out what the best is, or even what "the best" means.
That statement pretty much applies to all non-technological human
endeavors now -- including politics, religion and ethics -- in this age
of data glut. Perhaps the real Tower of Babel is not made of bricks,
and the world will neither end with a bang or a whimper, but in a
torrent of voices.
--
Ht
johan....@comcast.net
Howard Brazee wrote:
> In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and education,
> there will be lots and lots and lots of very good writers and other
> artists.
Isn't that future already here? As I understand it, in music and
literature there are lots and lots of really quite good artists who are
within one flutter of chaos-butterfly wings of being able to quit their
dayjobs, and within another of being flat-out famous.
Johan Larson
David Tate
> In article <1146887722.2...@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> "David Tate" <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>
> > Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> > > GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> > >
> > > > One assumes that, by then, 'pay' will have gone the way of the Dodo?
> > >
> > > Why should that be? What future advances would cause you to be
> > > willing to work for free?
> >
> > Is that a serious question? If so, the answer is clearly 'plenty'. As
> > in enough, surplus, a post-scarcity economy. When you can have enough
> > of whatever material thing you want just for the taking, there's no
> > point in being 'paid'.
>
> People want non-material things as well.
Of course. In fact, I said exactly that in the very next sentence,
which you inexplicably snipped and ignored.
The point is that those non-material things are not well-suited to the
notion of *pay*. How, exactly, would you arrange regular transfers of
a contractually-agreed quantity of bragging rights, happiness, status,
pride, sense of accomplishment, security, excitement, leisure, or any
of the many other non-tangible desirables?
In a post-scarcity economy, there is no point in wages, pay, salary,
etc. That doesn't mean there isn't still an economy -- but it probably
isn't a monetary economy.
David Tate
Daniel R. Reitman
wrote:
>:: And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority
>:: among the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
>On a spherical spinning earth, how do you count dates
>for contractual obligations?
If not specifically stated in the agreement, local time, usually.
Dan, ad nauseam
Mark L. Fergerson
> GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>Tim McDaniel <tm...@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>>David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>>And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority
>>>>among the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
>>>I've wondered about this one: with a space fleet in an Einsteinian
>>>universe, in which frame of reference do you issue paychecks?
> All inertial frames are equally good, so ISO or ANSI or somebody
> arbitrarily chooses one as the standard. The one in which the cosmic
> microwave background is most nearly isotropic is the obvious choice.
I had a similar thought re: finding a Universal Reference Frame, but
it was pointed out to me that two widely separated observers who each
boost such that they individually see an isotropic CMBR will still be in
motion WRT each other because the Universe is expanding, so no go.
I tend to agree with Wim Lewis downthread:
> The frame of reference of the issuing bank?
As in the _real_ Golden Rule; "He who has the gold makes the rules".
However there's likely to be more than one bank (on worlds in motion
WRT each other so the rate of exchange never holds still), and suppose
you have to use somebody else's ATM? Relativity fees on top of all the
other "other bank" ATM fees we have today?
Mark L. Fergerson
Alan Braggins
>
>And some material things are a bit difficult to provide
>in unlimited supply, for example houses on top of hills
>with near three sixty degree views of ocean, island,
>foreshore, hills, and forests.
In the context of paying starship fleets, there might
be more such locations than people.
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> said
>GSV Three Minds in a Can <G...@quik.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>> Tim McDaniel <tm...@panix.com> wrote:
>>> David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
>>>> And given an Einsteinian universe, how do you establish priority
>>>> among the multiple claimants for awarding of the various prizes?
>
>>> I've wondered about this one: with a space fleet in an Einsteinian
>>> universe, in which frame of reference do you issue paychecks?
>
>All inertial frames are equally good, so ISO or ANSI or somebody
>arbitrarily chooses one as the standard. The one in which the cosmic
>microwave background is most nearly isotropic is the obvious choice.
>
>> One assumes that, by then, 'pay' will have gone the way of the Dodo?
>
>Why should that be? What future advances would cause you to be
>willing to work for free?
The availability of anything I might reasonably want for a similar price
(zero). If we can do relativistic star ships I expect we can do matter
duplication or free energy or nanotech as well.
>
>> Alternatively, if your employees have relativistic starships under
>> their control, you pay whatever they ask whenever they ask. 8>.
>> ObSF: CJC's Alliance/Union series.
>
>It's true if a relativistic starship is crashed at full speed into an
>inhabited planet, it will make a hell of a mess. Is that what you're
>alluding to? (I haven't read that series.)
Doesn't actually happen in that series, but there is a relativistic star
fleet which basically 'pays' itself what it wants from any supposed
neutrals who want to keep breathing, since Earth appears to have quit
supporting them.
>Then there was Busby's _All These Earths_, in which the premise is
>that FTL travel is possible, but causes you to slip into a parallel
>world, perhaps one in which your employer never heard of you, or
>doesn't even exist. This makes it challening to recruit starship
>crews.
Ah, must add that to the 'to buy' pile, thanks. I quite like Busby,
although it'd never qualify as 'litterachure'.
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Keith F. Lynch
> Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>> arbitrarily chooses one as the standard. The one in which the
>> cosmic microwave background is most nearly isotropic is the obvious
>> choice.
> I had a similar thought re: finding a Universal Reference Frame, but
> it was pointed out to me that two widely separated observers who
> each boost such that they individually see an isotropic CMBR will
> still be in motion WRT each other because the Universe is expanding,
> so no go.
On second thought, I withdraw my suggestion, but for a completely
different reason: To properly establish priority, no award could be
made until signals from the most distant outposts of civilization
are received. Once we fill the universe, this could take eons --
especially since, as you point out, it's still expanding. The light
from the most distant galaxies we can see left them when they were
about 10 billion light years away. But they're moving away from us
at 90% the speed of light, so in a strong sense those galaxies are
actually 100 billion light years away from us now. And will of
course be even further away by the time we can colonize them.
So a better approach is to give the award to whoever's signal
containing the correct answer reaches the award judges first.
Perhaps if ISO or ANSI ever establish an official inertial reference
frame, it will be the one in the cosmic microwave background is most
nearly isotropic as seen from the vicinity of our solar system.
It would be interesting to see how short a distance one can measure a
difference in the isotropic velocity of the CMBR. And over how short
a time can we actually measure the cooldown, and hence finally bury
the last vestige of steady state.
As a side note, the reference frame in which the CMBR is most nearly
isotropic everywhere isn't inertial, but probably shares many useful
proprties with an inertial frame. So perhaps it will be adopted
instead.
Keith F. Lynch
> Isn't that future already here? As I understand it, in music and
> literature there are lots and lots of really quite good artists who
> are within one flutter of chaos-butterfly wings of being able to
> quit their dayjobs, and within another of being flat-out famous.
Indeed. On the other hand, I'm baffled as to how some ever became
famous. Chrichton, for instance, turns out workmanlike prose, but so
what? So can ten thousand other authors. Many of whom can write
better stories.
Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing
><johan....@comcast.net> wrote:
>> Isn't that future already here? As I understand it, in music and
>> literature there are lots and lots of really quite good artists who
>> are within one flutter of chaos-butterfly wings of being able to
>> quit their dayjobs, and within another of being flat-out famous.
>
>Indeed. On the other hand, I'm baffled as to how some ever became
>famous. Chrichton, for instance, turns out workmanlike prose, but so
>what? So can ten thousand other authors. Many of whom can write
>better stories.
He does, usually, have that ability to keep the reader turning pages. Stephen
King also has that ability. Neither are prose stylists, particularly. I think
Crichton (note spelling) honed that ability in his thrillers written as "John
Lange" early on.
He's then applied these techniques to a wide range of admittedly-fantastic and
not-admittedly-fantastic stories. Even when he's writing about sf topics, he's
not writing sf stories; he's writing Michael Crichton thrilllers, which makes
the question of whether there are better explorations of the sf themes he's
used irrelevant.
The audience for his books doesn't seem to care much about whether they're
about time travel, sexual harassment, cloning dinosaurs, or the imminent
supremacy of Japan over the US in international business. That audience isn't,
incidentally, as likely to identify the bogus elements of his premises as most
sf readers. (Even avoiding the genetics issues of Jurassic Park, who designs a
security system so that you have to completely shut down all power on site to
reset anything? Who puts the high-security confinement cage on the same
circuit as the perimeter fence? Since when is the programmer who wrote the
control system the sole 24-hour operator of the control system, and since when
can even the brightest person even _find_ the relevant code modules in a big
complicated control system, much less read and comprehend them, in mere
moments? The stuff I _do_ know about is generally so bogus that I'm no longer
inclined to take the stuff I _don't_ know about on faith, no matter how
authoritatively he writes about it.)
But he can generate suspense, keep his plots simple enough that movie
adaptations are reasonably straightforward, writes amusing dialogue, and keeps
readers turning pages without generally making them feel that they're being
insulted. These are gifts, they're fairly rare, and people looking for escape
reading find them worthwhile.
-- Alan
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>On second thought, I withdraw my suggestion, but for a completely
>different reason: To properly establish priority, no award could be
>made until signals from the most distant outposts of civilization
>are received. Once we fill the universe, this could take eons --
>especially since, as you point out, it's still expanding. The light
>from the most distant galaxies we can see left them when they were
>about 10 billion light years away.
There are galaxies that we cannot theoretically reach - they already
are farther away in light-years than the age of the universe. At the
speed of light we will never reach them. (They are only visible
because the universe was once a lot smaller than it is now).
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > And some material things are a bit difficult to
> > provide in unlimited supply, for example houses on
> > top of hills with near three sixty degree views of
> > ocean, island, foreshore, hills, and forests.
Doug Wickstrom
> All one needs for an infinite supply of those is a
> good bit of sailcloth, and a skilled landscape
> painter.
A view of the ocean does not look the same if you know
you cannot go for a swim in the ocean, and a view of
islands does not look the same when you cannot get to
the islands.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
asGgVwALgMO8u/oEWijyZn4+Fd5+f52N3v6vMfTP
4u7nTsyS7EKlXrKWh0K6OqRnpbzArjUs/fXWGuqgq
James A. Donald
On 6 May 2006 09:32:59 -0700, "David Tate"
<dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> The point is that those non-material things are not
> well-suited to the notion of *pay*. How, exactly,
> would you arrange regular transfers of a
> contractually-agreed quantity of bragging rights,
> happiness, status, pride, sense of accomplishment,
> security, excitement, leisure, or any of the many
> other non-tangible desirables?
Things that provide pride, sense of accomplishment etc,
are in fact regularly bought and sold - in fact that is
a very large part of what rich people spend their money
on. You will find it fairly expensive to climb a
mountain, or shoot a large dangerous animal.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
DafjPweX7zNeAwqC5D3q/U0uKbxYRmTetBbmBim/
4pUIud5BR5OAzS2iRmQOp1Q9mj1bGwpZzM8LN/T1W
Nancy Lebovitz
Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>
>There are galaxies that we cannot theoretically reach - they already
>are farther away in light-years than the age of the universe. At the
>speed of light we will never reach them. (They are only visible
>because the universe was once a lot smaller than it is now).
That's a remarkably sfnal statement as true statments go.
--
Nancy Lebovitz http://www.nancybuttons.com
http://livejournal.com/users/nancylebov
My two favorite colors are "Oooooh" and "SHINY!".
GSV Three Minds in a Can
wonderful person Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> said
Presumably if you believe the 'the universe is expanding at an ever
accelerating rate' theory, eventually we won't even be able to reach our
own. (Not that there'd be much left by that time). 8>.
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
frisbie...@yahoo.com
Yes, and this is the direct result of technology. With recorded and
broadcast music the demand for musicians dropped by maybe 99%.
Howard Brazee
Lebovitz) wrote:
>>There are galaxies that we cannot theoretically reach - they already
>>are farther away in light-years than the age of the universe. At the
>>speed of light we will never reach them. (They are only visible
>>because the universe was once a lot smaller than it is now).
>
>That's a remarkably sfnal statement as true statments go.
And it's not very believable of a sfnal statement, despite being true.
David Tate
> --
> On 6 May 2006 09:32:59 -0700, "David Tate"
> <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> > The point is that those non-material things are not
> > well-suited to the notion of *pay*. How, exactly,
> > would you arrange regular transfers of a
> > contractually-agreed quantity of bragging rights,
> > happiness, status, pride, sense of accomplishment,
> > security, excitement, leisure, or any of the many
> > other non-tangible desirables?
>
> Things that provide pride, sense of accomplishment etc,
> are in fact regularly bought and sold - in fact that is
> a very large part of what rich people spend their money
> on. You will find it fairly expensive to climb a
> mountain, or shoot a large dangerous animal.
I don't disagree with any of that, but it's not clear to me that (a) it
would still be cash-expensive (in some standardized medium of exchange)
to climb a mountain in a hypothetical post-scarcity economy, or that
(b) even if it were, that would provide a basis for salaried work.
What's expensive about climbing a mountain is equipment, travel,
training, hiring local guides/assistants, and so forth. In our
hypothetical future, which of those still require accumulation of a
currency? Not equipment, and not paying the locals (since whatever
they take their pay in is just as freely available to you as everything
else). Not training, where there's a time investment (which has no
opportunity cost) but the person doing the training is doing it for
kicks, or for non-monetary compensation, just like you are.
Travel is a possibility, but it seems to me that if travel is still a
limited-availability commodity then you aren't really talking about a
post-scarcity economy. And if the people who provide the travel have
no use for your cash, because *they* are part of a post-scarcity
economy, then even the scarcity of the resource (to you) doesn't
matter.
Am I missing something here?
David Tate
Keith F. Lynch
> James A. Donald wrote:
>> Things that provide pride, sense of accomplishment etc, are in fact
>> regularly bought and sold - in fact that is a very large part of
>> what rich people spend their money on. You will find it fairly
>> expensive to climb a mountain, or shoot a large dangerous animal.
Many seem to do so more directly -- by buying some expensive good,
and then acting as proud of it as if they'd built or even invented
it themselves. I've never understood that.
> I don't disagree with any of that, but it's not clear to me that
> (a) it would still be cash-expensive (in some standardized medium
> of exchange) to climb a mountain in a hypothetical post-scarcity
> economy, or that (b) even if it were, that would provide a basis
> for salaried work.
> What's expensive about climbing a mountain is equipment, travel,
> training, hiring local guides/assistants, and so forth. In our
> hypothetical future, which of those still require accumulation
> of a currency? Not equipment,
True.
> and not paying the locals (since whatever they take their pay in is
> just as freely available to you as everything else).
Here you're assuming your conclusion. You might as well say that
today if only everyone would agree to work for free, everything could
proceed just as as it does today, plus poverty would be abolished.
To a good first approximation we're already in a post-scarcity
economy, except for housing and medical care. And we always will be
with the former, unless they start manufacturing new land. (Of course
I'm assuming that they will, to get a solar system population of
10^20. But once the population reaches approximate that order of
magnitude, "land" in the solar system will resume being scarce.)
And we always will with the latter as long as medical care involves
human doctors, not just mindless machines. (If it involves *mindful*
machines, those machines will want to get paid.)
> Not training, where there's a time investment (which has no
> opportunity cost) but the person doing the training is doing it
> for kicks, or for non-monetary compensation, just like you are.
I currently proofread depositions for a living. I could do it for
free, if I had no expenses. But I wouldn't -- it's tedious. And I
don't think it could ever be automated until we have true AI. The
same could be said for lots of other necessary jobs.
(Actually, I might be willing to proofread really interesting ones,
simply for the opportunity of reading them. But, believe me, they're
in the extreme minority.)
Mountain climbing training may be interesting enough that people are
willing to do it for free, I don't know. But there is risk involved,
and I expect people will want to be compensated for that risk, if only
to the extent that they can buy insurance.
aramael
> Even avoiding the genetics issues of Jurassic Park
Accepting the, uh, mathwank of Jurassic Park implies that it's a
practical impossiblity to build a zoo that contains lions.
I imagine that most mainstream zoos use an Aibo with some sort of fur
coat.
A.
Keith F. Lynch
> nan...@panix.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
>> Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net>
>>> There are galaxies that we cannot theoretically reach - they
>>> already are farther away in light-years than the age of the
>>> universe. At the speed of light we will never reach them.
>>> (They are only visible because the universe was once a lot
>>> smaller than it is now).
>> That's a remarkably sfnal statement as true statments go.
> And it's not very believable of a sfnal statement, despite
> being true.
That's not universally (npi) accepted, even given the premise that the
expansion will continue, and will continue to accelerate, forever.
The large-scale structure of space-time is still poorly understood.
Equally plausible answers are:
* The expansion will stop accelerating, and reverse. We will be able
to reach everywhere. Eventually we will be able to reach everywhere
without leaving home, when "everywhere" all comes crashing down on
us. (There is little evidence for this, but it isn't ruled out.)
(This scenario sounds dire, but St. Tipler gives us hope.)
* We can reach galaxies which now appear 10 billion light years away,
and which are now actually 100 billion light years away, in about
200 billion years. (With relativistic time contraction, this time
can be made made arbitrarily short, but vast amounts of time will
have passed on earth, if, once having reached one's destination,
one turns around and returns there.)
* We can reach galaxies which now appear 10 billion light years away,
and which are now actually 100 billion light years away, in about
e^(100 billion) years. (Of course this is such a vastly long span of
time that nothing of interest will be there by the time one arrives.)
(With relativistic time contraction, this time can be made made
short, but only with absurdly high accelerations.)
* We will eventually only be able to reach galaxies in our local
supercluster. Those will forever remain gravitationally bound to
each other. Everything else will be lost to us.
* The accelerating expansion will eventually literally tear us limb
from limb, and, moments later, rend our very atoms. (Google on
"Big Rip.")
I hope to live long enough to find out.
Keith F. Lynch
> Yes, and this is the direct result of technology. With recorded and
> broadcast music the demand for musicians dropped by maybe 99%.
Yes. On the other hand, it made it possible for some musicians to
earn far more than otherwise would have been possible. And, more
importantly, made it possible for far more people to enjoy far more
varieties of music far more often far less expensively.
Could the same thing happen with other professions? I.e. instead of a
million people earning a living wage at it, there will be a thousand
earning a living wage at it, and a hundred earning a very high income.
The rest will have to find something else to do for a living. And
the product of that profession will be more available to more people.
Digression: *This* is why I'm a fan -- to explore such ideas. Not
to explore such well-worn ideas as, "What if there were a King, and a
dragon, and some unicorns, and some people went on a Quest to recover
or destroy the Fabled McGuffin of Antioch, and ..."
David Dyer-Bennet
In a world-wide post-scarcity society, the locals don't take pay any
more than you do yourself. And neither do the trainers, as you
suggest. Also, in a post-scarcity society there would be more people
wanting to climb Everest than the local environment could really
tolerate -- in fact that's true *now*, never mind in a full-blown
post-scarcity society.
> Travel is a possibility, but it seems to me that if travel is still a
> limited-availability commodity then you aren't really talking about a
> post-scarcity economy. And if the people who provide the travel have
> no use for your cash, because *they* are part of a post-scarcity
> economy, then even the scarcity of the resource (to you) doesn't
> matter.
Agreed, travel wouldn't be hard to come by. However space at the
desirable destinations might be -- or rather, we're not really
post-scarcity while space at the desirable destinations is scarce.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd...@dd-b.net>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/>
Pics: <http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/> <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>
Nancy Lebovitz
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> --
>On 6 May 2006 09:32:59 -0700, "David Tate"
><dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>> The point is that those non-material things are not
>> well-suited to the notion of *pay*. How, exactly,
>> would you arrange regular transfers of a
>> contractually-agreed quantity of bragging rights,
>> happiness, status, pride, sense of accomplishment,
>> security, excitement, leisure, or any of the many
>> other non-tangible desirables?
>
>Things that provide pride, sense of accomplishment etc,
>are in fact regularly bought and sold - in fact that is
>a very large part of what rich people spend their money
>on. You will find it fairly expensive to climb a
>mountain, or shoot a large dangerous animal.
I don't think you'll get regular transfers of contractually-
agreed quantities. It's all going to be reputation and people
points. (People points is a way of talking about the amount of
volunteer effort that goes into a project.)
Climbing mountains and hunting aren't going to be especially
good ways of getting reputation. Building a mountain that other
people want to climb would get you some reputation. So would
running a worldcon.
OBSF: "The Moon Moth", _Voyage to Yesteryear_.
Nancy Lebovitz
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
In the interests of completeness, I'll add the possibility that expansion
and contraction aren't universal. The universe is expanding here and
contracting there, with reversals and underlying rhythms.
Howard Brazee
>Travel is a possibility, but it seems to me that if travel is still a
>limited-availability commodity then you aren't really talking about a
>post-scarcity economy. And if the people who provide the travel have
>no use for your cash, because *they* are part of a post-scarcity
>economy, then even the scarcity of the resource (to you) doesn't
>matter.
In a post-scarcity economy, there will be lots of people into
entertainment.
Look at golf. Golf fans who pay for Tiger's winnings aren't
starving. Some of them are highly paid movie stars or CEOs. Lots
of these guys play golf, and would play more, except they're busy
starring or CEOing - not for money so much as for the prestige of
being a bigger star or CEO.
But with money, anybody can play golf or dig up dinosaurs or play the
guitar or write novels. Sturgeon's law will still apply, except
that all of those guys who used to spend all day picking cotton now
are doing more fun stuff. And the not-crud will be even more than
we have time to experience than it is now.
Keith F. Lynch
> [Crichton] does, usually, have that ability to keep the reader
> turning pages.
Not to me.
> The audience for his books doesn't seem to care much about whether
> they're about time travel, sexual harassment, cloning dinosaurs, or
> the imminent supremacy of Japan over the US in international business.
Has he ever written on any theme that someone else hadn't done better,
earlier? (No, _Jurassic Park_ was neither the first nor the best
cloned-dinosaur novel.) As for _Timeline_, I could probably name a
hundred better time travel yarns. I just don't get his popularity
at all.
David Friedman
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing <win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
> > [Crichton] does, usually, have that ability to keep the reader
> > turning pages.
>
> Not to me.
>
> > The audience for his books doesn't seem to care much about whether
> > they're about time travel, sexual harassment, cloning dinosaurs, or
> > the imminent supremacy of Japan over the US in international business.
>
> Has he ever written on any theme that someone else hadn't done better,
> earlier?
Has anyone else split Ibn Fadlin's account of his travels in the middle
and inserted Beowulf?
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
Keith F. Lynch
> But in any case, the question doesn't have foundation since there
> has been and never will be "lots and lots of very good artists" --
> at least not the kind whose ability to connect to and elevate their
> fellow human beings to the point that the oversupply of them will
> tragically limit their exposure.
If the population of the solar system were ever to reach 10^20,
billions of times the current population, why shouldn't the proportion
of very good artists remain roughly constant, resulting in there being
many billions of such persons?
> So far the web has not produced anything more worthwhile than
> low-cost and accessible porn,
The web is a medium of distribution, not of production. It can convey
texts, music, movies, paintings, costumes, recreational math, dance,
sculpture, and, yes, in principle entirely new as yet uninvented forms
of art, some of which may only exist on the web.
(I invented a new form of art. Google on "bitwise palindromes.")
> but if pressed to extremity, one may argue that usenet exchanges
> like yours and mine -- and even the shouting of trolls -- is a new
> albeit low-grade form of art, akin to epistolary efforts in their
> interplay of self-revelevations and obfuscations, more "concrete"
> than that of drawing room conversations by being logged for
> posterity, but having more "verite" than journals or blogs by
> their more spontaneous nature.
I would argue that nothing is art unless intended as art. On the
other hand there is "found art," such as the dada exhibit consisting
of entirely of a signed urinal -- which reminds me that I've seen
"found art" consisting of poetry composed entirely of spam subject
lines.
> ... this age of data glut. Perhaps the real Tower of Babel is not
> made of bricks, and the world will neither end with a bang or a
> whimper, but in a torrent of voices.
It's long been the case that nobody could read everything. So what
if this becomes even more extreme?
Kai Henningsen
> In article <e3e7j7$3ss$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
> Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> >Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
> >> In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and
> >> education, there will be lots and lots and lots of very good
> >> writers and other artists. Who will be their audience?
>
> I hear that there's almost no pure audience for American poetry--
> just about anyone who reads poetry also writes it.
> >
> >I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
> >producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis of, say,
> >1980, when at any given moment half the population was watching the
> >same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
>
> Finding what you're likely to like might get harder.
I don't think so.
We *already* have the beginnings of technology to solve that particular
problem. Think Google or the Amazon recommendation system (which I've seen
before on a noncommercial site I can't remember, but probably first heard
about here) - you keep track of what you like and don't like, so do large
numbers of other people, and the search engine correlates all that data.
Think scientific version of word-of-mouth recommendations.
The machine doesn't have to understand the stories. Hell, it doesn't even
have to be able to read them. It just needs to look at who liked and
disliked them, what else those people liked and disliked, and how that
correlates with what you liked and disliked. And then fish out the 100 or
so best matches.
Now I think about it, it has a lot in common with Bayesian spam filtering.
And with that large a database, it's bound to be pretty accurate once
you've read a few stories and told it what you thought about them.
And it can do the same to recommend pictures, or dinner choices. Nothing
in the system requires the subject to be of any particular kind. That's
the best sort of tool.
In fact, now I think about it, it might reasonably (!) suggest to you a
dinner choice based on what you read and what you have for a pet. Right
now, we don't have the kind of database where something like that could be
dug out with reasonable predictive value, but that is one of the things
that might change ...
> The modern amount of art erodes the idea of a canon--it's too hard
> to figure out what the best is, or even what "the best" means.
Or even why anyone would think that a meaningful question.
> What happens when there's magnitudes more art?
The system gets better.
> Or when there are more sorts of human nervous systems to make art
> for?
You have a larger chance of matching producer to consumer.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Kai Henningsen
Another problem is that our galaxy i actually moving fairly fast with
respect to that frame. IIRC, toward a point almost on the other side of
the galaxy from where we are (thus it took us a while to figure out
details), the so-called _Great Attractor_. Which attracts lots and lots of
galaxies fairly strongly, and has those close to the center colliding
fairly often.
Anyway, that means that the frame in question moves fairly fast with
respect to most interesting frames in our galaxy ... or even the whole
Local Group. A bit like having our on-Earth coordinate system centered on
Mars ...
Keith F. Lynch
> Climbing mountains and hunting aren't going to be especially good
> ways of getting reputation. Building a mountain that other people
> want to climb would get you some reputation. So would running a
> worldcon.
Ted White and Gary Farber are both more highly esteemed than Edmund
Hillary?
Keith F. Lynch
> But with money, anybody can play golf or dig up dinosaurs or play
> the guitar or write novels.
Surely dinosaur skeletons are a limited resource and, barring cloning,
always will be.
Mike Schilling
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote in message
news:e3lkne$i67$1...@panix3.panix.com...
> Nancy Lebovitz <nan...@panix.com> wrote:
>> Climbing mountains and hunting aren't going to be especially good
>> ways of getting reputation. Building a mountain that other people
>> want to climb would get you some reputation. So would running a
>> worldcon.
>
> Ted White and Gary Farber are both more highly esteemed than Edmund
> Hillary?
By Replublicans; the can't stand anyone named Hillary.
Keith F. Lynch
> Another problem is that our galaxy i actually moving fairly fast
No doubt there will be multiple frames in widespread use, much as
there are multiple time zones in use on Earth. In any contract or
arrangement for which time is significant, it will be important to
specify which one is intended.
Keith F. Lynch
> <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>> And some material things are a bit difficult to provide in
>> unlimited supply, for example houses on top of hills with near
>> three sixty degree views of ocean, island, foreshore, hills,
>> and forests.
Given a solar system population of 10^20, the vast majority would live
their whole lives indoors, in hollowed out asteroids or in hollowed
out fragments of dismantled planets and moons. A house *on Earth*
would be in extremely short supply. Of course very good simulations
would be available.
> To have a true "post scarcity economy", we need to make
> people scarce.
Nonsense. Economies of scale work the other way around. If you were
shunted to a parallel earth in which mankind never evolved, meaning
that everything that had ever been mined was still in the ground,
every species than man killed off still existed, and every swamp that
had ever been drained was still wet, you wouldn't be fantastically
wealthy, you'd be fantastically poor, and would soon starve to death
unless you first froze to death, fell into quicksand, or were eaten
by a carnivore.
r.r...@thevine.net
Henningsen) wrote:
There was a service that used to do this with films, which is now
defunct. One thing that they did in particular that I liked was give
a confidence level to the recommendations. So, if you generally don't
like action films, say, but a whole lot of people who like the same
kind of films you do are also seeing a particular action film, it
would flag it as a high likelihood/low confidence match. If you love
romantic comedies, it would recommend a different romantic comedy as a
high likelihood/high confidence match. This is very helpful for films
that violate genre rules, and those with twists to them.
Of course, my problem with ratings systems like this is that I seldom
see things that I do not like, so it skews the results.
Rebecca
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > And some material things are a bit difficult to
> > provide in unlimited supply, for example houses on
> > top of hills with near three sixty degree views of
> > ocean, island, foreshore, hills, and forests.
Alan Braggins
> In the context of paying starship fleets, there might
> be more such locations than people.
In practice, one not only wants a house on top of a
hilltop, but also with convenient access to other
people, without permitting other people convenient
access to oneself. So one wants a lot of land on top of
the hilltop, on the periphery of a village where the
typical lot size is a fair bit smaller than one's own,
(so that one has convenient access to the village
facilities, but the village does not spoil the
landscape) and nearly all the other houses are all
considerably lower down, decorating the view but not
intruding into it - and as I mentioned earlier, the sea
should be swimmable, and one should be able to sail to
the islands and find them almost empty, but not totally
empty - perhaps one lone fisherman casting for rockfish.
It should of course be walking distance to the village,
and village small enough that one sees both the
comforting lights at night, and the wilderness beyond
the village.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
u4zo0A+MeRouaiRbZuhHDHdpC6ak+E6ov9usHI27
4ug++19WkdT3UsJp+qpnq9nPtNv+8B4C1WbjvuwaJ
Nancy Lebovitz
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>> Climbing mountains and hunting aren't going to be especially good
>> ways of getting reputation. Building a mountain that other people
>> want to climb would get you some reputation. So would running a
>> worldcon.
>
>Ted White and Gary Farber are both more highly esteemed than Edmund
>Hillary?
Hillary was first--climbing Everest doesn't build your reputation a lot
now, and it will do less in a society of abundance.
Keith F. Lynch
> jam...@echeque.com wrote:
>> And some material things are a bit difficult to provide in
>> unlimited supply, for example houses on top of hills with near
>> three sixty degree views of ocean, island, foreshore, hills,
>> and forests.
> All one needs for an infinite supply of those is a good bit of
> sailcloth, and a skilled landscape painter.
> Or windows with changeable virtual views.
ObSF: Slow Glass.
What do people want from their ocean, or whatever, location? The
view? The ocean air? The ocean sounds? To go swimming?
A true virtual window could in principle be built. It would have to
record and replay, or calculate and simulate, the instantaneous phase
information over a grid of points about a quarter-wavelength of light
apart, at a sampling rate of a couple billion samples per nanosecond.
It would gobble bandwidth like nothing we've seen before, but it could
in principle be done. Of course that doesn't get you the sound, the
smell, the breeze, or the ability to go outside and play. The first
three at least, could easily be simulated.
Keith F. Lynch
> If I didn't have to worry about food and shelter and a steady
> supply of good books and nice toys, I could work for free at
> my first job, too.
What about medical care, legal advice, or other one-on-one personal
services?
Do you think every essential job is sufficiently interesting to enough
people that they would do it for free?
David Friedman
"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> > If I didn't have to worry about food and shelter and a steady
> > supply of good books and nice toys, I could work for free at
> > my first job, too.
>
> What about medical care, legal advice, or other one-on-one personal
> services?
>
> Do you think every essential job is sufficiently interesting to enough
> people that they would do it for free?
Even that, in the ordinary meaning of the terms, isn't sufficient.
You are, after all, choosing among jobs. If leisure gives you 100
utiles, plumbing gives you 200 and healing people gives you 300, then
plumbing isn't "sufficiently interesting" because you could heal people
instead.
Even in a world where people enjoy working, you still need a price
mechanism, or some analogous feedback system, to get the right number of
people doing each job.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald wrote:
> > Things that provide pride, sense of accomplishment
> > etc, are in fact regularly bought and sold - in fact
> > that is a very large part of what rich people spend
> > their money on. You will find it fairly expensive
> > to climb a mountain, or shoot a large dangerous
> > animal.
"David Tate"
> I don't disagree with any of that, but it's not clear
> to me that (a) it would still be cash-expensive (in
> some standardized medium of exchange) to climb a
> mountain in a hypothetical post-scarcity economy, or
> that (b) even if it were, that would provide a basis
> for salaried work.
Consider, for example, housing. You don't want to live
in the middle of nowhere, still less where all the poor
people live. You want to have convenient access to all
the best people - perhaps the smartest people, (Silicon
valley) or the most artistic people (San Francisco). If
all the best people go to the same place, it is going to
get crowded. Not everyone can have a big house near the
same place as all the other people want to live.
Suppose we have nanoassemblers. Any material thing you
want, you down load a program for making it, your
assembler compiles the program into a material thing. We
suppose that programs for all the usual material things
are available as open source, much as one can today get
open source operating systems, word processors,
spreadsheets, etc - but one cannot get a decent open
source html editor - indeed many people would argue one
cannot get a decent html editor at any price, and it is
best to edit html as plain unicode text.
And why do we want html editors? Because we want to
make stuff the way we want it, customizing stuff, and
not stuff that is another copy of something on the
internet. You want your garden landscaped, you are
going to hire a landscape gardener. Nanoassemblers are
going to vastly increase, not decrease, the scope for
that kind of work. The nanoassembler will spit a new
set of clothes every morning, but you are going to go to
a consultant for a new look, or to adjust the shape of
your clothes.
And I want a real kangaroo skin hat, with the subtly
irregular coloration and texture characteristic of
actual kangaroos, much as many people want a natural,
rather than synthetic sapphire. And absolutely no one
wants synthetic opals. All these many centuries we have
been breeding cows to produce a leather that is as
uniform as if it was a synthetic product, leather as
uniform as a beauty queen's skin, and now we are a bit
sick of synthetic looking products.
Suppose we have torn out a part of a star, and used the
material to build a shell around the star, so we have
plenty of land, and plenty of room. Well we already
have plenty of land and plenty of room, as you can see
by looking out the window when you fly over America, and
yet owning a big house with a nice landscape in the
middle of a desirable city is too expensive, even for
the very rich.
> What's expensive about climbing a mountain is
> equipment, travel, training, hiring local
> guides/assistants, and so forth. In our hypothetical
> future, which of those still require accumulation of a
> currency?
Travel, training, local guides, and customization of
equipment to your particular needs and preferences.
Equipment is already the least of your costs. If it
drops to zero, nothing much will change.
> Not equipment, and not paying the locals (since
> whatever they take their pay in is just as freely
> available to you as everything else).
If it is free, they are not going to take it as pay. You
are going to have to pay them with stuff that is not
free. If everyone's nanoassembler can produce a
hundred dollar bill, or a perfect diamond the size of a
mountain, it still cannot produce gold, (since that
requires nuclear transformation which is apt to
devastate large areas), so you can pay them in gold, or,
more conveniently, account transfers backed by gold, or
codes that a bank has agreed to turn into gold on
demand.
Suppose that due to our disassembling a star for raw
materials, we have more gold than we know what to do
with, we still have some things that are valuable, even
if they are not exactly things - for example land in
cities, board in hotels (someone has to change the
sheets, even if the nanoassembler spits them out). We
can then issue accounting units representing these
things, will have to issue accounting units representing
these things, or else we simply will not be able to pay
the guides and the trainer and the people who arrange
our travel.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
AeSQ972qjnUtwuIVK/l6AaluDkTMe4v3XGaKcjzG
4v0RL9rE1mh+1jbJTcmZiZ4QuE7sSB0z9YnPvysYj
John Coxon
> Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>> But with money, anybody can play golf or dig up dinosaurs or play
>> the guitar or write novels.
>
> Surely dinosaur skeletons are a limited resource and, barring cloning,
> always will be.
Not with a Tardis available.
--
John Coxon
ZZ9 Secretary - http://www.zz9.org/
"No, it changes the meaning to "What is the number of routes that a peep
needs to both traverse and shoot from the sky with a military-grade
surface-to-road missile in a giant ball of fire." - Petrazickis (afdaniain)
LiveJournal: http://johncoxon.livejournal.com/
Missing footnotes: http://www.nut.house.cx/cgi-bin/nemowiki.pl?ISFN
James A. Donald
James A. Donald wrote:
> > > etc, are in fact regularly bought and sold - in
> > > fact that is a very large part of what rich people
> > > spend their money on. You will find it fairly
> > > expensive to climb a mountain, or shoot a large
> > > dangerous animal.
"David Tate"
> > What's expensive about climbing a mountain is
> > equipment, travel, training, hiring local
> > guides/assistants, and so forth. In our
David Dyer-Bennet
> In a world-wide post-scarcity society, the locals
> don't take pay any more than you do yourself.
If they don't take pay they don't work. Whereupon
whatever they provide becomes mighty scarce.
So we will always have a scarcity economy. Manufactured
physical things will cease to scarce, as bulk food has
already ceased to be scarce. Today, vikings are
unlikely to travel to far off places and burn buildings
in order to steal sacks of salt. Indeed manufactured
physical things are already not very scarce. Pillaging no
longer makes sense, and more subtle means are necessary
to steal other people's wealth, though the scum have yet
to figure this out. We are already in a post scarcity
economy as far as transportable physical things are
concerned, and yet people are working harder than ever
and demanding pay more than ever.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
VoF4k9lKnI8X+CuanujnhWZSZXRzdywF0TiEEMee
41VUuC50k6NOkUFCcDqX5MoCjElqalACxL8EluSaC
Richard Todd
> On 07/05/2006 21:22, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>
>> Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>>> But with money, anybody can play golf or dig up dinosaurs or play
>>> the guitar or write novels.
>> Surely dinosaur skeletons are a limited resource and, barring
>> cloning,
>> always will be.
>
> Not with a Tardis available.
Ah, that's the explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs: they went
extinct due to too many of them being shot and taken back by big game
hunters from uptime.
ObSFWritten: _Time Safari_ by David Drake, which also postulated that the
cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs was due to visitors from uptime
who came back to see them, but with a somewhat different mechanism in mind
(spoiler warning:
Dinosaurs are related to birds, so presumably are susceptible to some
of the same diseases. One of those diseases, parrot fever, got loose
downtime about 70Myears ago thanks to fuckups by Our Heroes, and the dinosaurs
had no immunity.)
--
NewsGuy.Com 30Gb $9.95 Carry Forward and On Demand Bandwidth
Zev Sero
> bulk food has already ceased to be scarce. Today, vikings are
> unlikely to travel to far off places and burn buildings in order
> to steal sacks of salt.
Coincidentally, a day or two ago I found myself wondering just when
it was that salt ceased to be a precious commodity, right up there
with gold and jewels, and started being as cheap as dirt, too cheap
to worry about wasting. The thought occurred to me as I was throwing
out the remainder of an over-generous pinch of salt, and realised
that in earlier centuries that might have been enough to get me
committed.
I was going to ask this as an AKICIF, but this post gives me a
convenient hook.
Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing
>Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing wrote:
>
>> Even avoiding the genetics issues of Jurassic Park
>
>Accepting the, uh, mathwank of Jurassic Park implies that it's a
>practical impossiblity to build a zoo that contains lions.
And even if you have only two lionesses, they'll somehow manage to mate and
have offspring because Nature will Find A Way.
> >I imagine that most mainstream zoos use an Aibo with some sort of fur
>coat
I think it's holograms. (Of course, Ray Bradbury, in "The Veldt", tells us
that even that won't work.)
-- Alan
Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing
>Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing <win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>> [Crichton] does, usually, have that ability to keep the reader
>> turning pages.
>
>Not to me.
>
>> The audience for his books doesn't seem to care much about whether
>> they're about time travel, sexual harassment, cloning dinosaurs, or
>> the imminent supremacy of Japan over the US in international business.
>
>Has he ever written on any theme that someone else hadn't done better,
>earlier?
I thought _The Great Train Robbery_ was pretty good (and a better movie,
when he did it, than the first movie of that name is now).
> (No, _Jurassic Park_ was neither the first nor the best
>cloned-dinosaur novel.) As for _Timeline_, I could probably name a
>hundred better time travel yarns. I just don't get his popularity
>at all.
He's not writing for _you_. He's writing for the bestseller audience,
who need to be reassured about sf concepts that they're possible.
-- Alan
Mark L. Fergerson
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=9tOzm...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>
>>Another problem is that our galaxy i actually moving fairly fast
>>with respect to that frame. ...
> No doubt there will be multiple frames in widespread use, much as
> there are multiple time zones in use on Earth. In any contract or
> arrangement for which time is significant, it will be important to
> specify which one is intended.
Yabbut, time zones are static WRT each other; your scenario means
stock tickers, prime lending and inflation rates and so on will be
constantly sliding around. There just ain't no proper common time. Can
you say "clinesterton beademungen"?
IMO better to pay crews by proper time as experienced by said crew
(verified by ship's clock etc.), even granting time dilation. After all,
they're the ones taking the physical risks.
Completion for offworld contractors would be similarly handled; pay
by the local hour experienced, and penalize per time over allotted
measured from local start time.
Mark L. Fergerson
Mark L. Fergerson
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=9tOzm...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>
>>Another problem is that our galaxy i actually moving fairly fast
>>with respect to that frame. ...
> No doubt there will be multiple frames in widespread use, much as
> there are multiple time zones in use on Earth. In any contract or
> arrangement for which time is significant, it will be important to
> specify which one is intended.
Yabbut, time zones are static WRT each other; your scenario means
Nancy Lebovitz
Kai Henningsen <kaih=9tOzl...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>nan...@panix.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote on 05.05.06 in
><e3eaic$j5p$1...@reader1.panix.com>:
>
>> In article <e3e7j7$3ss$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
>> Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>> >Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>> >> In a lot of futures I have read, with sufficient wealth and
>> >> education, there will be lots and lots and lots of very good
>> >> writers and other artists. Who will be their audience?
>>
>> I hear that there's almost no pure audience for American poetry--
>> just about anyone who reads poetry also writes it.
>> >
>> >I imagine it would be something like the Web. Many, many content
>> >producers, and many, many different audiences. The anthesis of, say,
>> >1980, when at any given moment half the population was watching the
>> >same TV show, and half the rest were watching another.
>>
>> Finding what you're likely to like might get harder.
>
>I don't think so.
>
>We *already* have the beginnings of technology to solve that particular
>problem. Think Google or the Amazon recommendation system (which I've seen
>before on a noncommercial site I can't remember, but probably first heard
Probably Alexlit.
>about here) - you keep track of what you like and don't like, so do large
>numbers of other people, and the search engine correlates all that data.
>Think scientific version of word-of-mouth recommendations.
>
>The machine doesn't have to understand the stories. Hell, it doesn't even
>have to be able to read them. It just needs to look at who liked and
>disliked them, what else those people liked and disliked, and how that
>correlates with what you liked and disliked. And then fish out the 100 or
>so best matches.
>
>Now I think about it, it has a lot in common with Bayesian spam filtering.
>
>And with that large a database, it's bound to be pretty accurate once
>you've read a few stories and told it what you thought about them.
It only works if enough people find, read, and rate obscure works, and
my feeling is that there will be so much stuff that a lot won't get
found.
Nancy Lebovitz
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> --
>In practice, one not only wants a house on top of a
>hilltop, but also with convenient access to other
>people, without permitting other people convenient
>access to oneself. So one wants a lot of land on top of
>the hilltop, on the periphery of a village where the
>typical lot size is a fair bit smaller than one's own,
>(so that one has convenient access to the village
>facilities, but the village does not spoil the
>landscape) and nearly all the other houses are all
>considerably lower down, decorating the view but not
>intruding into it - and as I mentioned earlier, the sea
>should be swimmable, and one should be able to sail to
>the islands and find them almost empty, but not totally
>empty - perhaps one lone fisherman casting for rockfish.
>It should of course be walking distance to the village,
>and village small enough that one sees both the
>comforting lights at night, and the wilderness beyond
>the village.
This is a matter of taste. I'd like to live in a college town,
thoough not near loud parties, and have a teleport disk near
my front door.
Andrew Wheeler
>
> So far the web has not produced anything more worthwhile than
> low-cost and accessible porn,
Ridiculously untrue.
Just one website, the now-defunct Ellen Datlow-edited Sci Fiction,
brought us the following award-winning stories:
"Over Yonder" by Lucius Shepard
"The Pottawatomie Giant" by Andy Duncan
"Goddesses" by Linda Nagata
"The Cure for Everything" by Severna Park
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford
"What I Didn't See" by Karen Joy Fowler
All of them -- and much more good speculative fiction -- is still
available at http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/archive.html.
--
Andrew Wheeler: Professional Editor, Amateur Wise-Acre
--
If you enjoyed this post, try my blog at
http://antickmusings.blogspot.com
If you hated this post, you probably have bad taste anyway.
Doug Wickstrom
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>James A. Donald:
>> > And some material things are a bit difficult to
>> > provide in unlimited supply, for example houses on
>> > top of hills with near three sixty degree views of
>> > ocean, island, foreshore, hills, and forests.
>
>Doug Wickstrom
>> All one needs for an infinite supply of those is a
>> good bit of sailcloth, and a skilled landscape
>> painter.
>
>A view of the ocean does not look the same if you know
>you cannot go for a swim in the ocean, and a view of
>islands does not look the same when you cannot get to
>the islands.
You asked for a _view_. So I gave you a way to get a _view_.
Seth Breidbart
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>If the population of the solar system were ever to reach 10^20,
>billions of times the current population, why shouldn't the proportion
>of very good artists remain roughly constant, resulting in there being
>many billions of such persons?
For any sort of art that's reproducible, the standards would go up.
>I would argue that nothing is art unless intended as art.
And I would argue the opposite. I've seen some amazing street theater
that I know wasn't intentional.
> On the other hand there is "found art,"
Precisely.
> which reminds me that I've seen "found art" consisting of poetry
>composed entirely of spam subject lines.
Though since presumably that involved rearranging, I wouldn't call it
"not intended as art".
Seth
Seth Breidbart
<frisbie...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>It depends. If communication moves at light speed, then it takes years
>to find out what is going on elsewhere, so things would be local and
>more or less the same as now. If you have instant communication, then
>you would have a supercompetitive situation.
I disagree. If communication moves at light speed, then a book
written 100 light years away won't get here for another 100 years.
But a book written 100 years ago 100 light years away is arriving now,
so the number of "new to Earth" books each year is still approximately
the number of books written each year.
Seth
Seth Breidbart
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>James A. Donald:
>> > And some material things are a bit difficult to
>> > provide in unlimited supply, for example houses on
>> > top of hills with near three sixty degree views of
>> > ocean, island, foreshore, hills, and forests.
>
>Doug Wickstrom
>> All one needs for an infinite supply of those is a
>> good bit of sailcloth, and a skilled landscape
>> painter.
>
>A view of the ocean does not look the same if you know
>you cannot go for a swim in the ocean, and a view of
>islands does not look the same when you cannot get to
>the islands.
But you can go for a swim in the ocean.
The real hilltop house is a few miles from the ocean, so they have to
travel for a while to get to the ocean. People with the fake view
also have to travel for a while, maybe even a shorter while.
Seth
David Friedman
Zev Sero <z...@sero.name> wrote:
> James A. Donald wrote:
>
> > bulk food has already ceased to be scarce. Today, vikings are
> > unlikely to travel to far off places and burn buildings in order
> > to steal sacks of salt.
>
> Coincidentally, a day or two ago I found myself wondering just when
> it was that salt ceased to be a precious commodity, right up there
> with gold and jewels, and started being as cheap as dirt, too cheap
> to worry about wasting. The thought occurred to me as I was throwing
> out the remainder of an over-generous pinch of salt, and realised
> that in earlier centuries that might have been enough to get me
> committed.
I don't think salt was ever right up there with gold and jewels. Think
of it as more like an important industrial chemical, used in preserving
meat and other such purposes. Expensive by the mule load, not by the
pinch.
Keith F. Lynch
> Coincidentally, a day or two ago I found myself wondering just when
And I've long wondered how it ever was, at least for in sea powers
such as Rome. (The word "salary" comes from Latin for "salt.")
How hard can it be to evaporate some sea water?
Tim McDaniel
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>I don't think salt was ever right up there with gold and
>jewels. Think of it as more like an important industrial chemical,
>used in preserving meat and other such purposes. Expensive by the
>mule load, not by the pinch.
A tax on salt financed a large chunk (most?) of the pre-revolution
French government, and I didn't get the impression that they taxed it
at 1,000,000%.
Googling ... hmmm, "Price of Salt" has rather more hits as a novel ...
<http://www.salt.org.il/legabelle.html> says that the price of salt
late in the 18th C was 2 to 62 livres per quintal (112 pounds),
depending on the region, and each inhabitant used 1/5 to 1/10 quintal
per year. Unfortunately, I don't know what the purchasing power of a
livre was.
I don't have time at the moment to look at more hits for
"price of salt" -"Claire Morgan" -"Patricia Highsmith"
--
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tm...@panix.com
David Friedman
tm...@panix.com (Tim McDaniel) wrote:
> In article <ddfr-3580AC.1...@news.isp.giganews.com>,
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
> >I don't think salt was ever right up there with gold and
> >jewels. Think of it as more like an important industrial chemical,
> >used in preserving meat and other such purposes. Expensive by the
> >mule load, not by the pinch.
>
> A tax on salt financed a large chunk (most?) of the pre-revolution
> French government, and I didn't get the impression that they taxed it
> at 1,000,000%.
As I said, think of it as an industrial chemical. That's not salt to
sprinkle on your food, it's salt for preserving meat and tanning hides.
David Tate
> "David Tate" <dt...@ida.org> writes:
> >
> > What's expensive about climbing a mountain is equipment, travel,
> > training, hiring local guides/assistants, and so forth. In our
> > they take their pay in is just as freely available to you as everything
> > opportunity cost) but the person doing the training is doing it for
> > kicks, or for non-monetary compensation, just like you are.
>
> In a world-wide post-scarcity society, the locals don't take pay any
> more than you do yourself.
That depends on whether they are part of my post-scarcity society or
not. I was leaving open the possibility that they might not be -- the
way Sherpas were not part of the society that kept sending alpinists to
attempt Everest.
> And neither do the trainers, as you
> suggest. Also, in a post-scarcity society there would be more people
> wanting to climb Everest than the local environment could really
> tolerate -- in fact that's true *now*, never mind in a full-blown
> post-scarcity society.
I agree. On the other hand, it's hard to see how "opportunities to
climb Everest / see the rings of Saturn / flip flirgle with Drake
Maijstral himself" could form the basis for a workable payroll system.
> > Travel is a possibility, but it seems to me that if travel is still a
> > limited-availability commodity then you aren't really talking about a
> > post-scarcity economy. And if the people who provide the travel have
> > no use for your cash, because *they* are part of a post-scarcity
> > economy, then even the scarcity of the resource (to you) doesn't
> > matter.
>
> Agreed, travel wouldn't be hard to come by. However space at the
> desirable destinations might be -- or rather, we're not really
> post-scarcity while space at the desirable destinations is scarce.
Exactly.
Again, I'm not arguing that there won't be resources under contention
-- just that they won't be the kinds of things that would tend to be
payable as salary.
David Tate
Keith F. Lynch
> htn963 wrote:
>> So far the web has not produced anything more worthwhile than
>> low-cost and accessible porn,
> Ridiculously untrue.
> Just one website, the now-defunct Ellen Datlow-edited Sci Fiction,
> brought us the following award-winning stories: ...
I think htn963 new forms of art, different from anything that existed
before the web, in the same sense as music, painting, sculpture,
movies, and dance are all different from each other.
I agree, and pointed out that this is because the web is a medium of
presentation, equally capable of presenting any form of art.
Keith F. Lynch
> This is a matter of taste. I'd like to live in a college town,
> thoough not near loud parties, and have a teleport disk near my
> front door.
If you have a teleport disk near your front door, what difference does
it make where you live, so long as it has a good climate and is quiet?
David Tate
> David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> > If I didn't have to worry about food and shelter and a steady
> > supply of good books and nice toys, I could work for free at
> > my first job, too.
>
> What about medical care, legal advice, or other one-on-one personal
> services?
Sure, throw those in too. I was practicing metonymy.
> Do you think every essential job is sufficiently interesting to enough
> people that they would do it for free?
Certainly not. Which is why you can't have a post-scarcity economy
until the insufficiently interesting essential jobs are not done by
people.
David Tate
Keith F. Lynch
> Yabbut, time zones are static WRT each other; your scenario means
> stock tickers, prime lending and inflation rates and so on will be
> constantly sliding around.
In practice, I doubt it will be much of a problem. A common frame for
the whole solar system won't differ by even one part per million from
Mercury to the Oort cloud. It will be about as big a problem as leap
seconds are now. (Few landlords went bankrupt because their tenants
got one extra second before their rent came due.) And other solar
systems aren't traveling particularly quickly relative to us. Nor are
other galaxies in comparison to their distance. So what if frames are
seriously askew between two galaxies a billion light years apart?
> IMO better to pay crews by proper time as experienced by said crew
> (verified by ship's clock etc.), even granting time dilation.
> After all, they're the ones taking the physical risks.
It's been pointed out that the Apollo crews each should have collected
several nanoseconds of overtime pay.
Relativistic time dilation just isn't very significant until you get
fairly close to the speed of light, or very close to a neutron star
or black hole.
David Tate
> In article <9tOzl...@khms.westfalen.de>,
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=9tOzl...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
> >
> >We *already* have the beginnings of technology to solve that particular
> >problem. Think Google or the Amazon recommendation system (which I've seen
> >before on a noncommercial site I can't remember, but probably first heard
>
> Probably Alexlit.
That was my thought, too.
> >about here) - you keep track of what you like and don't like, so do large
> >numbers of other people, and the search engine correlates all that data.
> >Think scientific version of word-of-mouth recommendations.
> >
> >The machine doesn't have to understand the stories. Hell, it doesn't even
> >have to be able to read them. It just needs to look at who liked and
> >disliked them, what else those people liked and disliked, and how that
> >correlates with what you liked and disliked. And then fish out the 100 or
> >so best matches.
> >
> >Now I think about it, it has a lot in common with Bayesian spam filtering.
> >
> >And with that large a database, it's bound to be pretty accurate once
> >you've read a few stories and told it what you thought about them.
>
> It only works if enough people find, read, and rate obscure works, and
> my feeling is that there will be so much stuff that a lot won't get
> found.
The corollary to that is that, the more different competing
recommendation services you have, the less well any one of them works.
If everyone uses the same one, you get tremendous utility (assuming it
can handle the load).
AlexLit was a fantastic recommender of SF for SF fans -- but it also
tended to recommend SF to *everyone*, because the population of AlexLit
raters was heavily skewed toward SF fans. And its poetry
recommendations were extremely skewed toward the tastes of the handful
of (SF fan) poetry readers who had bothered to rate any poetry.
David Tate
Keith F. Lynch
> Ah, that's the explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs: they
> went extinct due to too many of them being shot and taken back by
> big game hunters from uptime.
One of Robert Sawyer's first novels had the premise that the cause of
dinosuars going extinct was an action taken by time travelers who went
back to find the cause of dinosuars going extinct.
Keith F. Lynch
> Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>> David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>>> If I didn't have to worry about food and shelter and a steady
>>> supply of good books and nice toys, I could work for free at
>>> my first job, too.
>> What about medical care, legal advice, or other one-on-one personal
>> services?
> Sure, throw those in too. I was practicing metonymy.
Food, books, manufactured goods, and electricty may someday be
"too cheap to meter," but I doubt one-on-one personal services
ever could be, for reasons that should be obvious.
>> Do you think every essential job is sufficiently interesting to
>> enough people that they would do it for free?
> Certainly not. Which is why you can't have a post-scarcity economy
> until the insufficiently interesting essential jobs are not done
> by people.
Do you think there could ever be robotic doctors and lawyers that
are clever enough to do good work, but not clever enough to demand
a salary?
r.r...@thevine.net
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> --
>James A. Donald wrote:
>And I want a real kangaroo skin hat, with the subtly
>irregular coloration and texture characteristic of
>actual kangaroos, much as many people want a natural,
>rather than synthetic sapphire. And absolutely no one
>wants synthetic opals.
You know, I googled for synthetic opals, and some of them are very
nice. I would be willing to take one of the synthetics over the
natural opals that I can afford. Then again, my taste in natural
opal tends toward the 30K range, so I may not be that far off the
target audience for synthetics. Plus, I buy jewelry because I like
it, and don't really care whether the stone is rare or common,
man-made or natural. The only question is: Does it look nice on me?
Rebecca
Mark Atwood
>
> This is a matter of taste. I'd like to live in a college town,
> thoough not near loud parties, and have a teleport disk near
> my front door.
Once one has the teleport disk, I'm going to have a multiacre estate
in central Alaska, another one in central cascadia, and will regularly
visit Seattle, Boston, Salt Lake, New York, and Tokoyo.
And so can pretty much everone else.
--
Mark Atwood When you do things right, people won't be sure
m...@mark.atwood.name you've done anything at all.
http://mark.atwood.name/ http://fallenpegasus.livejournal.com/
Mark Atwood
>
> Yes, and this is the direct result of technology. With recorded and
> broadcast music the demand for musicians dropped by maybe 99%.
The demand for musicians did not drop. The *supply* of sufficently
high quality music (but not necessarily musicians) *rose* many orders
of magnitude.
There are lots of people who make music. Just like there are lots of
people who do ink&pen, and lots of people who knit. Just that the
technology aided supply of music, text-on-paper, and textiles, means
that it's almost impossible to make a living as a musician, a scribe,
or knitter. The few who do do it with either careful niche selection,
the teaching of other hobbiests, and/or careful managment of celebrety.
Mark Atwood
>
> The point is that those non-material things are not well-suited to the
> notion of *pay*. How, exactly, would you arrange regular transfers of
> a contractually-agreed quantity of bragging rights, happiness, status,
> pride, sense of accomplishment, security, excitement, leisure, or any
> of the many other non-tangible desirables?
You are apparently unaware of which much of the discretionary spending
of the non-celebrity wealthy is.
It's for *experiences*, less than than for more and more "stuff".
Once they have the Very Nice House, and the Very Nice Car, and the
Very Nice Clothes, its for things like:
Hunting, boating, extensive travel, extreme travel, mountaineering,
hosting and/or attending parties with witty and/or well-known people
(which is part of the reason for obtaining the Very Nice House and the
Very Nice Home Theater), excellent dining, and expensive and intricate
hobbies and crafts. Personal training, sports training, and skill
training. Specialized tutors and teachers.
Mark Atwood
>
> I don't disagree with any of that, but it's not clear to me that (a) it
> would still be cash-expensive (in some standardized medium of exchange)
> to climb a mountain in a hypothetical post-scarcity economy, or that
> (b) even if it were, that would provide a basis for salaried work.
Even in a post-scarcity economy, there will still be a scarcity of
semi-pristine mountains. The good ones will have access fees.
Even in a post-scarcity economy, there will still be a scaricty of
personal trainers, sports trainers, and mountaineering guides.
When I lived in Alaska, I got to know several such trainers and
guides, who made a Very Good Salary, providing training, support,
guidance, and gruntwork for Very Wealthy people from China, Japan, and
Europe, who wanted to do mountain climing, big game hunting, big
fishing, and so forth.
Mark Atwood
>
> We *already* have the beginnings of technology to solve that particular
> problem. Think Google or the Amazon recommendation system (which I've seen
> before on a noncommercial site I can't remember, but probably first heard
> numbers of other people, and the search engine correlates all that data.
> Think scientific version of word-of-mouth recommendations.
>
> The machine doesn't have to understand the stories. Hell, it doesn't even
> have to be able to read them. It just needs to look at who liked and
> disliked them, what else those people liked and disliked, and how that
> correlates with what you liked and disliked. And then fish out the 100 or
> so best matches.
>
> Now I think about it, it has a lot in common with Bayesian spam filtering.
>
> And with that large a database, it's bound to be pretty accurate once
> you've read a few stories and told it what you thought about them.
>
> in the system requires the subject to be of any particular kind. That's
> the best sort of tool.
There is even a web site that uses similar techniques finding really
cool people that someone would likely enjoy knowing, who would enjoy
knowing them back.
OkCupid.
(I just spend the weekend enjoying a Very Good Time with several
people who I can directly attribute my getting to know them via OkC.)
Mark Atwood
> >
> >The machine doesn't have to understand the stories. Hell, it doesn't even
> >have to be able to read them. It just needs to look at who liked and
> >disliked them, what else those people liked and disliked, and how that
> >correlates with what you liked and disliked. And then fish out the 100 or
> >so best matches.
> >
> defunct.
NetFlix does it.
In fact, it's starting to look like NetFlix's database of those "those
who liked this also like that, and like this sort of thing", may
actually be more valuable in $$$ terms, as the movie studios are
paying bux to mine it, than the revenue stream from rentals is.