Truly sorry for my butchering of 'scarcity'! I'm curious though, and genuinely want to know: If money came to an end and reputation was our new currency, what would you do with your time?
Great question! If money ceased to be and reputation became the new currency, I’d continue focusing on what brings me joy and allows me to contribute meaningfully to both individuals and the collective. For me, that means chasing creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving in ways that add value to others’ lives while feeling intrinsically fulfilling. Reputation as currency feels like an invitation to double down on purpose-driven pursuits-whether through deepening knowledge, collaborating with others, or simply offering acts of care and humor that uplift those around us. In essence, I’d lean into what lights my own path and, hopefully, makes the journey a little brighter for others too
Try to get a better reputation! And it wouldn't be easy, for reason having mostly to do with an unpleasant, difficult-at-best personality. A system like that would put an even higher premium on social skills than our own society already does. For many, that would be fine. But if you're neurodivergent, wired awkward, and find social interaction difficult.......
Time? Raising a great family, civics, morals, build a better AI (build knowledge/wisdom), fitness, and tinker with both developing strains of beautiful guppies and tasty tomatoes. Perhaps even jump into architecture for a beautiful and function balance.
Lol. I just thought the person did not know how to pronounce scarcity correctly. Similar to how different English speaking countries sometimes pronounce and/or spell some words differently than others. (I am looking at you - America)! Lol. :D :D
@@kieranrollinson8750heck, not even countries but just individuals sometimes have a quirky word. English is my only conversational language and I get ribbed for how I pronounce a couple words.
I heard this form a political streamer. He pointed out that we have reached a high technological advancement but lack the social technology to deliver the benefits to the general population. He was spot on
That's because we live in a cyberpunk timeline now. High tech, but it really does nothing to improve society and is instead used to create cruel systems that dictate how people live and work.
We’re still at the point where we do need human labor for a good amount of things, so we wouldn’t be able to transition over to a “post-scarcity” system, not for a long while either
He is a non-native English speaker, but his pronunciation is so good, in general, one does not think that. At first, I wondered whether this was a Canadian pronunciation with which I was unfamiliar.
@@LMinem Nowadays when I run into this sort of discrepancy I may suspect that I am listening to a bot of some sort, but anyone who reads a lot knows a bunch of words that they may not know how to pronounce. Or at least that is true for English.
Since you mention Wells: He has also a novel called "Men like gods" which is unfortunately not very well known. But it is probably one of my favourite depictions of an utopia in science fiction. The society in the novel works much similar in that all material needs are met but people still work for "reputation". the outside character asked one of the utopists what would happen when there is someone who just doesn't work to which the utopists replied that this would be a sad individual who wouldn't be able to find meaningful bonds with others because everyone else would be repulsed by it.
Jack London wrote a book about an author who wrote rejected book after rejected book, and no one wanted anything to do with him until he got one published and then everyone wanted everything he'd ever written. It ends with the guy killing homself, because he realizes how fake everyone's esteem is.
"Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn.... A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?""
Unfortunately for me, working for money by working on what I love doesn't get me very much (but it is still something at least), but if all my needs were met and money wasn't necessary anymore, I would be quite happy. I would work on the things I am passionate about, learn skills without having to worry about considering whether or not I have to take future earning and jobs into account, and just in general make myself happy doing what I do while also enriching other people's lives in doing what I am happy doing. One thing I have learned in life is that doing work gives you purpose. But doing work just to survive doesn't always give your life purpose.
how do you get something you desperately need from someone who doesnt need anything you have to offer? you dont welcome to the world where you have to do without if you dont have skills others want again if you think inequality is bad now create a system where those who have little or no skill to barter with and cant get what they need because they have to trade or beg for it and imagine those with enough skill and talent to dictate who can or cant get their time/service/product and calculate how many people you will have consigned to misery and death at the very bottom of your ideal society, you dont have to wait look to china and their social credit system to see what will happen
@@mouserr As productivity continues to go up, the number of people required to satisfy everyone's needs goes down. Eventually resulting in a Post-Scarcity economy where needs are taken care of by automation (including the automation needed to harvest the raw materials and create the parts it needs to build that automation). With a large enough number of the means of production, that the automation produces, there would literally be no cost
@@TechnoPagan87109 theres always a cost and in the lead up to your pipe dream how many millions will be sacrificed? you cant answer but you know people will die because they were of no value ... just like today
@@TechnoPagan87109 important to note that the amount of means of production isn’t all that helpful to us if the ownership of the means of production remains within the hands of like 10 people on earth.
Your analysis of the social, economic and political impact of technological advances is relevant in today’s world as AI is becoming more mainstream stream. Thanks for this.
This is why I read sci-fi -- it's a mirror into ourselves and often posits how our decisions as a society affect future generations, especially how technology changes everything for better and for worse simultaneously. For anyone wanting more insights into post-scarcity (scare-city), I suggest the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. It's a post-scarcity future with a lot of the same themes as this Orville episode, but in much more depth - what do people do in a society with no concept of money? The books don't have to be read in order, so I suggest starting with Player of Games.
You mean they "GET" the "VISION" and "PHILOSIOPHY" of Trek? The very REASON, Trek came into existence in the first place, which even, far, far, too, many Trek fans themselves, seem to miss??!! Well, if this is so, maybe I have always, misunderstood this show, as I always, thought it was a spoof on the Original Trek.
@@ivanj.conway9919. I think it originally was a spoof to get some traction because they couldn’t compete with Star Trek directly. They didn’t have the budget. But, they had some very good people behind the scenes.
@robertsolomielke5134 if that was true Kamala and her billion dollar budget would have won. She proves that money doesn't equal the seat, just as Hillery did in 16. They both had a bigger pot, and richer more connected billionaires, than the republicans have. The issue is the democrats parties billion air donors is they have proven over many years that are terrible people that don't care one bit about its supporters. I'm not a trim fan or hater. I just concentrate on what I see. I don't think his term this time will be good, but it will be better than the alternative that was offered by the waring party.
@@robertsolomielke5134 the majority still vote decided who to elect influence by billionaires yes may be. but still it's up to the common people as long as we are allowed to vote.
I'm so glad someone else recognizes the actual meaning of Post-Scarcity, After Capitalism. You're right. The reason they manufacture Drugs is to make money. That's the same reason they grow food, and why half it goes to waste each year. It's the same reason we build housing, which is why there is enough housing to take care of all the homeless, but they're still living in the street. There's no profit in taking care of people
Water is not a scarcity, drinkable water is. Less than 1% of water on Earth is drinkable. And we share that not only with other humans, but with plants and animals too. The synthesizer or replicator do not do not get rid of scarcity, they still need energy and raw resources. Artificial scarcity places a bottleneck to control the flow of resources. It can be done better, sure. It can be done worse, too. No resource is infinite. Some are more abundant than others, but they, too, have a limit.
Homeless people are NOT homeless because of profit, they are homeless because they destroy homes ! This seems counterintuitive, but look at the Chicago Tenements. These public housing units were built for the poor and homeless, but once they were in them, they became over run by gangs, and the non-renters just trashed every unit, to the point that the only option left was to tear them down and try something else ! When the homeless are responsible enough to not destroy houses, then homes will be offered to them to rent, this isn't a huge leap, the problem is, how do you make someone do something they don't want to do ?
What's the point of "Taking care of someone" on someone else's money? You do realize no one stops you from taking care of anyone... The problem is... You want to yell out loud for SOMEONE ELSE to take care of those, FOR FREE. "There is enough housing to take care of all the homeless". Housing built and paid by who? My money? Okay... How much of my money belongs to you and why? (And since you all go crazy when reading the word "money", replace it with any resource of your choice. Time, energy, materials, etc)
If I wasn't poor and working 12 hours a day to stay afloat, I'd be in a laboratory, working on the gyroscopic engine I have a concept for, and working on Waste Water Mitigation Systems, & Energy Recapture systems in our world. If poverty wasn't keeping me down, my life would have and give so much more meaning to humanity.
Don't be discouraged, life is not about Great Big Things like inventing a revolutionary technology or working to some heroic end. Its about how you treat the people around you each and every day. Are you generous with what you have? I'm not talking about money, your most valuable resource is your time, attention, kindness. By this we will be measured once our lives on this planet are over. How we treat others is what matters, that is what the creator is looking for from us in this first phase that we call our "life". If we fail in this endeavor all we have to do is ask the creator to forgive our failures and he does, giving us more opportunities to act right by bringing more people into our lives that need our help in someway. There is a post scarcity reality, but its not on this plane of existence. Before we are ready to live in that utopia we have to pass through this plane of existence to learn the importance of being selfless and loving. And also of our own inability to actually be selfless and loving without asking the creator for help and for forgiveness for all the times we were greedy and unloving to our fellow humans. Then at the end of our lives when we are moved into the next reality we will be mature humans ready to learn the next thing the creator has for us.
Yet my Sister, you are worth as much as the wealthiest person on this planet. You are worth as much as any pope or king out there. The evil of capitalism linked to materialism, is that it makes people believe they are only WORTH, something if they HAVE STUFF, yet the MORE, you have the WORST, you are or tend to be anyway, usually. It does not buy Quality of Character and Spirit for sure, or breed a Quality Human Being, as that does and always has, come from WITHIN. I am in the exact, same, boat, Sister, and I would change the world if I did not always, have to worry about merely, surviving. Change will come, it must or we have no chance to survive. Warmest Wishes from Canada. Out.
@@lexpox329What if the creator wants us to use our gifts in this life instead of just waiting for it to be over so we can finally be what he actually had in mind for us for this life? To me this concept of postponing life until it's over was always very strange.
I'm British. No it's not a British thing. No-one pronounces it like that, because we are not Americans. ROFL. - It's "Scare-city" and everyone in the UK pronounces it such. Peace and
@@dyotoorion1835Ah'm from Texas and we pronounce it "Scare City" here. The words I have mispronounced in my life are those which I read in books but didn't hear. These days I go to Google pronounce when I encounter a new word. It's bloody brilliant.
If I live in the Orville universe, having everything I need, I would still love to write, help build homes, fix computer, etc. I will probably have a garden or even a farm and give food away. I'm sure I won't work my ass off, but I would love to live like that. I know this is simple thinking because it's just 'what if-ism.'
Actually in this episode Kelly tells Lysinda, or whatever her name is, that in the Union everyone has their needs met and the only "currency" is just your good reputation. But she also says that everyone has to do at least something, not doing anything and just wasting your life is frowned upon in their society. This is why you have to do something, anything, whether it's art, STEM, Military, anything, even if you aren't good at it.
You wouldn't need to build homes, give food or fix computers, the replicator would do that. So you would write books competing with AI. And the garden you can have it right now. Just saying... :)
that is something that would be valid in the 1800s, not today, you can go to google and find plenty of sites that tell you how to pronounce correctly a word.
@@kolinmartz Nope. Ignorance is still simply not knowing. What did I do last night? Do you know? Is your ignorance of what i did a choice (yes, what I did is publicly available).
even if a matter synth actually existed, the amount of energy required, assuming efficiency of 100%, would be at least 9E13 Joules PER GRAM, i know star trek and the orville are not supposed to be uber realistic, but i hate that this is basically never adressed. the glass of water she made used the energy equivalent of a few hundred kiloton nuclear bomb. EDIT: this is assuming it is converting energy into matter . the values were calculated through e=mc^2 e=(0.001kg)×(3E8m/s)2, e=0.001×9E16, e=9E13joules per gram.
If you can convert energy to matter, and especially if you can convert energy into whatever specific configuration of matter you want, then you can probably do the opposite as well. A 500g glass of water might represent an enormous amount of energy (4.5E16 J), but you can get that energy by feeding the replicator 500g of anything else you want to get rid of. Star Trek replicators don't exactly work like that though (otherwise why bother with dilithium when you can power the ship for a month by dumping a handful of dust into the replicator). They're more like extremely high resolution 3D printers. Enough resolution to turn helium into gold, though rearranging whole atoms is more efficient. That still means it can disassemble organic waste into its component elements and then reassemble them into whatever food you ask for.
I always assumed that the Star Wars replicator was just a sophisticated transporter that could transport individual atoms from a storage depot somewhere and precisely assemble them into the desired object. That's why some objects cannot be made by replicators - because the raw atoms are not available. Other objects, such as food, are mostly made from hydrocarbons and water so they can be easily replicated.
Yes! Thank you for pointing out a concept that sometimes even Star Trek itself misunderstands: that replicators and teleporters mean nothing if people and society doesn't mature past the greedy ambition for accumulation. Even in the utopian future of the Federation, replicators weren't around for a lot of time. It was always about a societal shift rather than a technological one. As for the people "pointing out" your pronunciation, well... What was that saying about the guy pointing at the star and people only looking at the finger?
True, and while we have persons in thing's like big pharma, agriculture/food industry etc openly putting profit before people getting away with these things, the cycle is continuing. Perhaps the issue isn't about the upper echelons being in charge though. Maybe it's more about the regular citizens choosing to believe none of them have nefarious tendencies so don't want to promote a society that's not all,not just a few 'bad apples'. Also, sounds like a reference to the Bruce Lee student in Enter The Dragon...
For billionaires, it would never be enough. Ever larger yachts would be built because each wants to have the biggest one. Even owning more than they could ever use, they still want more for themselves.
@ And you are wrong again. Your definition of "Comfortable" might mean you need MORE or LESS than he does. Which means one of you is going to own more. It also implies that given everyone is different, some of these people who say "I just want a comfortable lifestyle" will want MORE than they actually need. Look at people who say being able to go on two vacations abroad is the bare minimum. Then look at people who say they need a two floors house and a car for each family member to be bare minimum. The "Comfortable" argument is subjective at best and inconsequential in truth. The guy above is right. People will want more than they need. EVEN YOU will want more than you need. You are here trying to talk nonsense in a YT comment which implies you have both free time and internet and spend both on youtube... You don't NEED this for a comfortable life. Maybe by MY definition of "Comfortable" you shouldn't have internet. So don't try to spit that bullshit term you just googled "non sequitur" to appear smarter than you are. Were you actually knowing that term (and not google it as I said), you'd also know he was right. Curb the arrogance.
If I can choose, I would work about 30 hours a week in two types of jobs. One in research, to test my mental skills, and the other in construction, to test the physical aspect. This would be a good way to balance these two aspects and avoid burn out. By the way, it's crazy how one little mispronunciation detracts the whole comment section from the amazing content you're creating.
the only way things would change for the better if we got the matter synthesizer in our world right now, is if at least one were installed in every single household on the planet, with large ones in central locations that everyone can use.
I had the exact same thought! There are some points that worries me though, first would be the matter (pun very much intended) of energy, and I'm not sure every households can handle the strain on their electrical systems - though of course if an adequate power source would go along that point is moot - then close second would be that such a device lands in the hands of violent criminals who hurt people for power and greed and not survival and in the hands of terrorists whod use it to make weapons or bombs - though I suppose a security hardwired into the system would take care of that - then the governments themselves, I fear they'd forcefully remove or outlaw the usage of the devices because the lobbies behind them would force their hands or because dictatorships wouldn't let their citizens enjoy such privileges.
@@Fyr365 oh government would absolutely try to do that. the power source would also be a problem too you're right. such a device almost certainly would take a small fusion generator to power it, or if plugged into an outlet would probably use as much energy as an entire city. converting energy into matter or manipulating molecules into specific structures ((the matter synthisizer does one of those things)) would take immense amounts of energy to do. as far as the criminals go. the playing field is actually far more evened out now. they can get weapons, so can everyone else. they also have much less reason to hurt anyone, at that point its just the psychos and not the gangs really anymore since gangs are financially motivated. the governments would absolutely try to ban them. except for a few. this would cause a mass exodos to those few countries, which would probably start a world war. of course thats in the case of any government actually being able to successfully collect and ban them. which could be made much harder if taken ones get replaced every day ((every household on the planet got one over night. whoever did that can continue their work)). but even without that, citizens would hide them world wide if the governments started trying to take them, there would be a small supply of them in nearly every community and it would still be a failed effort. just like the war on drugs and prohibition were and are both failed efforts. banning something never works.
We don't need matter synthesizers, we can just use the current technology and logistics to have a delivery service that would bring to you any product you wanted. Get rid of branding, get rid of competition in the system, get rid of all the layers and inefficiencies. That would create the problem of too much centralized power into a single entity, or maybe we might find a way of having a distributed network system that works towards that goal without centralization. But that seems like an impossible logistical problem, we need new ways of dividing that power and new politics. But considering we found a way to solve control over the machine. The only thing required for that would be just energy, that's the real scarce resource. That's why I don't like the de-growth mentality. You don't get to the post-scarcity through de-growth and slow down, the opposite. The real problem with our dependency on oil for everything is that its stopping us from finding and using an even more dense and powerful source of energy. Nuclear was supposed to be that. Petrol is 50K BTU per gram. Nuclear is 5M BTU per gram. I bet to really have post-scarcity we need some power source that's 5T BTU per gram, it must be Nuclear Fusion, but that's being way much hard to get than what we thought. And we didn't even switched away to Nuclear. We need to go from 20TW to 200PW (that would be the total radiance of Sun on Earth). It can only be done by Solar and Nuclear, forget about everything else and we're centuries from being able to control Fusion. That's what I don't like about "climate change", they're too much focused on CO2 reduction instead of being focused on making more energy, for a cheap price. Its almost like the purpose of "climate change" is to control the production of CO2 and keep it at "safe boundaries", safe for the powers that be, the ones that have assets in oil. If there was no restrictions anyway about the generation of power, what would happen is that CO2 use would naturally decrease as we find that Solar power and Nuclear power is really cheaper and better. We need more energy, not less. And no, industry doesn't pollute, the more advanced and the more complex and developed it becomes, the less it pollutes. Its sub-developed countries that produce most of the pollution by lack of regulation. In theory, nothing prevents the industry to be perfectly self-contained and leak no pollution into the environment. People blame industrialization, and they say things like "but the cost". The real cost is energy, if energy is cheap, then cleaning pollution is trivial. But companies are never going to do that because of profits, no, they are not going to do that if their competitors can profit from not doing it, if they are all required to do it, then you just do it, the field is leveled. Considering you don't have a centralized system that has no internal competition, but considering we're not there yet. The real root of problem are the Malthusians. Another thing that I think would make people free from being "economical units" would be pricing everything in energy use, actual "Watts". Imagine if I everything I bought would be just the cost in energy that it required for the item to be produced. I bet you it would be very cheap. The irony when Bitcoin is baked by the price of energy doesn't escape me, it really is the currency of the future.
@ okay, some of that is just wrong, industry not polluting being what im talking about. also never said anything about not needing more energy, we need a lot more. more than you said even. all what you said would do is bring us up to a type 1 civilization. but none of what you said, solves the problem of scarcity which a matter synthesizer would. without developing something like a matter synthesizer humanity is just a plague of locus. consuming endlessly till we consume ourselves out of existence.
Something we're all learning these years is that even when certain individuals have everything and more, it's just never enough. We have people on this planet who have money and resources for thousands of lifetimes in total luxury, yet they keep on hoarding and taking away from others no matter the cost. The reason? When you have "everything", all that remains in their head is to increase the gap between you and everyone else further, and if you can't go any higher, all that's left for these people is to push everyone else down into absolute misery. Even if we invented the matter synthesizer right now and gave one to any person in this world overnight, there would immediately be some people using it to *take it away* from others, until they're the only ones left with one.
It's not that. It's that if you print cars, all car manufacturers go bankrupt and their owners, all their power and thus predictability, stability, survival, etc...
It is not about scar-city or having resources, it was always about power. Power is never enough for those who seek it. That's why I those movies are always a meh for me, I don't like utopias, they cast away this basic part of human nature. Marx was stupid and never understood that, the problem isn't capitalism, the problem is human nature. Even if all resources were free, even time, power would still be scarce, because you can only have one master. Maybe we can change that, but then are we human anymore ? I think that's what separate this society from the next level, but genetic engineering is taboo, even thou we are not religions anymore, we sort of still are, the neoliberal religion don't like "eugenics", as they call it. They want their "cattle", I mean, their population they govern to be equal "economical" units. They say its for economical output, but really its about control. If people can just change themselves, then no one can control anything anymore.
As soon as I heard the opening line of this video about Orville I was like "He's going to talk about the episode about the woman from the society ruled by capitalist and social media, and the matter synthesizer. And how managing certain technologies demand certain moral codes to prevent them from ruining society." Bam! I also admit that is probably one of the best episodes that I continue to think about since I saw it. Really great episode.
I feel like if we worked for reputation, then we would focus on pleasing others as the main goal, resulting in overworking and hiding your own mental health so that you can continue to work without others getting concerned. You'd be so focused on getting the job done that you forget about yourself. In Japan, people often take pride in what they do, and therefore there are less profit-over-quality products there... Most of the stuff made there is usually pretty well made. However my Japanese mum sometimes tells me about how working there is very stressful, and results in late nights and apparently once she fell asleep while walking home from work. I reckon working purely for reputation would be a better system than we have right now, but still have many problems.
This was my fav episode although all of them are excellent. I remember wondering the same things as this girl and realizing that it takes a mental paradigm shift that occurs slowly over time that helps a society take the steps necessary to become a post-scarce world. This conversation they had was a profound one for me too. When you hear TRUTH, you know it. I became a bitcoiner in 2017 and over the last 4.5 years especially I've learned so much about how we are already taking the steps by replacing our infinate fiat money that has led to all of the ills we currently face in society with a scarce hard money that by virtue of it's scarcity will help bring much more abundance to us all and actually reverse the wealth inequality problem that's dividing us. And even better, it will do this globally simultaneously to everyone around the world but it must be acknowledged, studied and understood by each person in turn and that does take time, so that the necessary paradigm shift can occur within them. We are currently 16 years into the shift and we are all very hopeful for the positive change for humanity that will be brought about because of it. We are trying to teach people as fast as we can to minimize the collateral damage as we go thru this necessary transition because we know what's possible on the other side. Then one day in the future if we make discoveries like the matter synthesizer, we'll be ready to handle it without it tearing us apart as it would today.
I’d like to present a counterpoint to your example with Nestle and water. This is not meant to be confrontational, just another perspective: Ok, first of all, water is absolutely essential to life, and as such it should be free, or as close to free as we can make it. No argument from me whatsoever. I agree. And pretty much anywhere you go in the developed world, tap water is damn near free. My water bill runs about $50/month, which comes to about $8.94 per 1,000 gallons. Now that’s *not* free, but the money I pay goes to support the infrastructure, the cost of laying and maintaining the pipes, purifying the water, pumping it, and of course paying the salaries of the people who work for the water utilities, so I think *most* people would agree that’s fair, yes? The expense isn’t for profit, it’s just to ensure the supply continues. Because water is essential to life. *BOTTLED* water is *NOT* essential for life. It is a luxury. An individual 16.9 oz bottle here runs about 93 cents if I buy a 24-pack at the store, making it, what, about 18 cents per ounce? That’s several THOUSAND times what tap water costs, and, as has been repeatedly shown here in the US, Nestle’s bottled water *IS* just tap water put in plastic bottles at a several-thousand-percent markup. So *water* is a necessity, *bottled* water is a luxury, and one that only doofuses buy. If people were dying of dehydration in the developed world and Nestle was controlling the supply, that would be a problem. But they’re not. They’ve just managed to convince millions of suckers that their tap water is better than everyone else’s tap water. There’s an ethical dilemma there, but it’s one I’m willing to overlook as it keeps 48,000 people employed in the US, who would otherwise have to work at some probably-worse job. Now when we come to the subject of the high price of insulin, or various other drugs, *THERE* I agree with you. Medical companies have a captive audience and can charge whatever they want. It’s price gouging at the expense of people’s lives, and it’s not fair. Again: Medicine is always gonna cost *SOMETHING.* The development of medications can take years or decades, and that’s extremely expensive, and some medications are always going to require more effort and resources to produce than others. For instance, Insulin doesn’t require a ton of effort to make, and you have economies of scale bringing down the cost more, so it runs about $30/dose in Canada, most of the expense of which is simply the cost of bottling, shipping, and keeping it from going bad. In the US a dose is about $100, which is way the hell too high. The Canadian price is probably appropriate or nearly so, the American price is gouging. OTOH, drugs like Zolgensma required decades to develop, is harder than hell to make, and is useful only in a relatively small number of (very important) cases. So even if we lived in a world where everything is free, Zolgensma is still going to require VASTLY more man-hours to produce Insulin. So the exorbitant cost of that drug - and trust me, brother, it’s crazy expensive - isn’t unjustified.
very well presented point, and you are right... but only *within* capitalism. The entire focus of the argument by the Orville and the video is that, well, to use your example, your water *would* be free. Because without capitalism, there would be no cost to support the infrastructure, laying down the pipes, purifying the water etc. Of course that's work that needs to be done, and of course there needs to be a system in place to make sure that work is done! But with capitalism, that system is essentially coercion: it's part of the larger system of work and prices that dictate you *must* work, or be deprived of resources, dignity, life even. Same with medicine: you say things "always gonna cost *SOMETHING*" but again, that's only true under capitalism. A different system, with a different way to make sure that work is done, can absolutely and potentially work without having anything cost anything. In the cases where you have something that is objectively harder to produce, that new system also must figure out a way to distribute that limited resource appropriately, of course. But it does not *have* to be capitalism, especially when you are dealing with fiction and are free to imagine totally different system. In the case of the Orville, I don't even think it is totally correct to say it is a totally scarcity-free utopia: could I get a capital class super starship with the most powerful possible weapons on it just because I want it? I doubt it. Their system obviously must have guardrails and ensure their top, actually scarce or dangerous technology is controlled. But that system does not have to be capitalism. Hell, when you consider it like that we are already doing it in some cases: I'm sure Bezos has technically enough money to buy a small, or even not so small, fleet of jet fighters, tanks, bombs and military equipment... but we decided that does not fall under capitalism, and you can't buy it as a private individual or company.
Essential is interesting. How you obtain essential items and services determine the price. Water is essential but how you get it determines the price. Water has always been an interesting topic. In most countries access to water is cheap but because its so cheap so much of this is wasted even accidentally or unknowingly.
@@myky992 I think the main issue I have with your rebuttal is that you seem to be associating cost with a price tag. The price tag is a marker of cost (and even the Soviet Union had money) but the cost is the labor and resources put into the creation of something. Scarcity is an unfortunate fact of the universe, conservation of mass, conservation of energy, second law of thermodynamics, etc. When you spend time to do one thing it costs you the opportunity of having done something else, so opportunity cost exists because life is finite. So there will always be cost. The real question is allocation. Who gets the things that cost something to make? Capitalism has an answer to this, but can easily go wrong if not well managed. Marxism has another answer, but the feedback mechanism seems a lot weaker to me. It is a fact that people prefer to get more allocation for less cost. The ideal in a market economy (not Capitalism) is that allocation is in proportion to the incurred cost of the individual. In Capitalism the ideal is that allocation is in proportion to the creation of value (value I would say being a reduction in collective cost), and in Marxism anyone gets what they need and only give what they are able. The last one sounds great, until you remember that most everyone prefers to get more allocation for less cost. What happens when 'needs' exceed 'abilities'? Any economic theory that will work has to answer the cost-allocation question, and has to take into account the deal-seeking selfishness of normal people, and the fact that scarcity is fundamental to the universe. I admit I find explorations such as we see in Orville very interesting for all the same reasons everyone who showed up here probably does. However, I also recognize it is a fiction. The idea that reputation is the compensation for work does nothing to solve the allocation problem. And if reputation is the basis of allocation we have something that easily starts looking like corruption. But, it is interesting to consider the moral lesson of a hypothetical society where everyone is basically a volunteer charity worker.
@@myky992 So the man hours to make it are free? The man hours to ship it are free? The fuel used to ship it is free? You're argue that cost is exclusive to capitalism is false on the face of it.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint... Everything you've said works on the FALSE premise that you NEEDING something also means you DESERVE it inherently. And that "deserve" also implies someone has to provide it to you for free with no effort on your end. So your whole argument / point crumbles under logical questioning.
I'm not onboard with the Orville's idea of "reputation" as currency. Reputation is more easily counterfeited than money. Social Media proves this consistently. Good video though. I've been a little skeptical of the the whole post-scarcity idea, but I think you addressed the idea appropriately.
Star Trek: First Contact (movie) had a scene that made a similar point about society moving away from the need for money and being able to find actual fulfillment.
OMG, what a fascinating blend of cool info and jaw dropping naïveté about how goods and services are actually created! I am a left leaning socialist oriented futurist, but to neglect to see the actual prosperity enabled by capitalism is genuinely unfortunate.
You can't "cure" old age, because who would want to live for 500 years, with no cognitive functions anymore. Additionally, there will always be accidents.
Shows like the Orville focus on the cream of society and the creme that *wants* to fit in to the societal model. There will always be people who would rather drop out than fit in. Of course, if there were no needs, it would be fine, but the focus of shows like this are always on the exceptional individuals, not the ordinary, or those who rebel. I would love to see a show like this that includes "views" of all of the rest.
@@AdeTri-pu7qi People can rebel over anything. Recognition, ego, reputation, partnership, etc. You seem to limit your thinking very much with that question. You assume people rebel only for certain reasons you personally deem fit instead of accepting reality, people can rebel over ANYTHING they think is unfair (EVEN if it isn't).
@ you can't just say "people rebel for anything" without giving any example, in their world everyone can do anything they want not because they need, you made up the concept of unfairness for that situation and make everything unusually complicated.
@@Kira110lol It's true, and cultivating grievance over total non-issues is part of the dictator's playbook (never mind that we're looting you, just look at those transgender immigrants over there!). Good education helps with this.
I remember halfway through the first season of Orville figuring out that 'humanity in a post-scarcity existence' was the theme and nobody agreed with me.....
While the mispronunciation if scarcity is a bit distracting, you shouldn't let that detract from the video. Your doing some really great work, and should keep it up.
The Orville was an amazing show with fantastic writing that looked at so many issues affecting us today without being "preachy" about it. I'm a HUGE fan. So glad you took the time to make this video. New subscriber here.
saying bottled water is artificially made scarce is just not honest, its transformed, its purified, its put into a bottle and transported to locations more convenient to you than the aquifer or stream they came from, labor and capital are used to make the natural state of that water into something way more convenient for you, this transformation is scarce as all that could have been used for the water could be used for something else, but there was enough demand for the water to justify it
And tap water is significantly cheaper, partially subsidized by the government and thus partially paid for with our tax money, and is piped to us directly. I would argue that tap water is far more convenient and the only thing necessary to make it hand transportable is to buy a reusable bottle and wash it out every other day or so. People are lazy and stupid and have no clue how the world around them works, which is why we keep getting so many armchair quarterbacks decrying that capitalism is evil while we haven't even truly had it for many decades, if not at least a century. All of the social programs which could have been done better by private individuals have eroded our previously capitalistic economy. Now it's some unholy degradation, a ghost of its former self. It's been demonstrated that if the money paid into social security were instead invested in the private sector that a person could earn significantly more money and could even retire with it.
"its transformed" into what? Its still water. "its purified" so is tap water ans in some country the restrictions on tap water are stricter than on botteled water. "more convenient for you" more convenient than your Tap? Everything you say also is true for tap water. Yet tap water is significantly cheaper than botteled water. So yes, botteled water is kinda somewhat a scam.
@@Fluxikator no one is forcing you to buy bottled water. You can drink cheap tap water or free rainwater. Bottled water is a service for people who choose to pay for it.
@18:09 if they run the idea of having Lysella be a re-occurring character then they will be taking inspiration from an idea in ST Voyager. With ratings problems in Season 3 it was suggested that the show could use an idea seen in ST IV The Voyage Home. The idea is that of an audience surrogate. In the 1996 two-part episode "Future's End" the viewers are introduced 20th century astronomer Rain Robinson (played by Sarah Silverman). The audience surrogate in ST IV is 20th century cetologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (played by Catherine Hicks). It was considered that Silverman's character was to join the crew in that episode and return to the 24th century at the end. In the end stated that Brannon Braga, Voyager's co-executive producer, abandoned the idea and instead chose Jeri Ryan to join the crew in season 4 of the show.
"Water is abundant and essential so it should be free." That's not how it works though. Water is everywhere, yes, but water that is clean and pure enough to drink is absolutely _not_ everywhere. Even if we eliminated all pollution, water generally needs to be treated before it's safe to drink, and in many parts of the world water is quite scarce. _Someone_ has to build and maintain the infrastructure to gather, purify, and distribute that water, and those people should be compensated for their effort. Even if it's considered a public good and paid for with taxes, it's still not free. Bottled water is a different thing. In most cases bottled water is an unnecessary product, yes. But in some cases it actually does provide a use. Many places have tap water that is unsafe to drink. Places where infrastructure has been destroyed need bottled water. Actually creating and distributing that water takes effort, energy, and time.
Plus, there are plenty of contexts where drinking water exclusively from tap would be unwieldy or unsanitary. Imagine being on the subway in a huge city like NY and being thirsty. Your only reasonable source of drinkable water is going to public toilets and drink from the sink. You’d need a very higienic society that respects public property (not modern US for what I see), a very involved cleaning setup (also costly), and constant vigilance over a huge area for biochemical attacks for this to not go horribly wrong eventually. I swear, sometimes people complain about stuff without thinking about two seconds about the feasibility or repercussions of the alternatives.
HE is a German and they ALWAYS had a strong leftist streak, just like NOW, when the totally destroyed their economy with the MAD green agenda and blaming the results on US. Seek: Frankfurt School all of the crazy leftists making a plan how to destroy capitalism on the West. Well, can not say their descendants are not successful..... German industry, meanwhile is relocating to the US, because they are being destroyed by unreliable and extremely expensive electricity and outrageous taxes. Lastly, dear LAZY Germans, THIRTY HOUR workweek is NOT enough today in this world.
But what causes tge water to be dirty besides the obvious, it's the money they take money out of the water budget for other things THEY find important and Mexico is a great example just search up Mexico clean water you'll see they choose not to maintain the necessary infrastructure
The truth that can never be spoken is that we are multiple subsets of a single species. One of these subsets desire to impose their will on others and we call that imposition power. When you talk about everyone sitting around on our phones all day, you deny the very nature brought humanity into existence. Humans, in general, are not long satisfied doing nothing for extended periods of time, yet very few of us seem to consider that very few of us are like we are, personally. You like making videos and I would guess that is because you are a creative person, an artist. Artists invariably make their art when left to their own devices because that is what satisfies that drive. Some of us are very physically oriented and given the choice would spend most of their time doing physical things. Others are problem solvers, or teachers, or parents, and so on. Long ago these drives were known as "our calling". The argument that society must operate as it does was invented by the power seekers to convince us, or perhaps themselves that they are right, thus justifying their actions in forcing others to do that which they would never choose to do. This discussion is way too big for UA-cam comments or even hundreds of videos, but it is absolutely vital to everyone, and our future depends on having it.
"One of these subsets desire to impose their will on others and we call that imposition power." There are many subsets that wish to impose their will on others. Who are the people you call "power-seekers" but people you want to bend to your will to pay for your wish list?
@@PvblivsAelivs I don't understand your question. Are you asking me to define this trait? Are you asking if I want to make someone else pay for my wish list? Maybe I just completely missed your point..
The subject is very relevant to me, since I tried to find a job that I would not have only to pay my groceries but also give me a vital sense of purpuse. Its too bad to me that many managers become unhappy very soon, as it seemed logical to me that this job was somewhat well paid, but don't give you, for many people, a full sense of purpuse other than to enforce company stuff and rules on people. What you said is very true about technology in general, without education and in general as well, the more you advance, the more you take the risk to create dangerous things (internet i.e.).
"I can do a job I like?" "Yep." "Wow. Okay, I wanna be a starship captain." "Uh, okay... are you qualified?" "Actually yes, I passed all the courses." "Oh. Um, well, there's only three postings available and over ten thousand applicants." "Yeah but I REALLY REALLY want to be a starship captain." "But there's over-" "Hey you said there's no scarcity!"
@ Hmmm technically possible if replicators are that available. And now we have zillions of people making starships and captaining them, and also pulling their hair out trying to get enough crew members. "No I'm the captain, you're the navigator." "No I wanna be captain, YOU can be the navigator!" "NO NO NO I'M THE CAPTAIN GODDAMMIT"
@@perfectionbox so what we do for cars?? Have a license program and insurance??? It’s the same when you go on a road trip, the driver(worker), the front seat navigator and social director, back seat snack dispensers and all around good time. We have worked this out in the past??? Do you not have friends?
You need to use the replicator smartly when you land on the planet. Somehow replicate enough replicators that supply and demand are equal, or otherwise hide the technology except for select secretive instances. Or replicate enough gold and currency that once the governments catch on, money will be worthless if they admit to it. But there will be a precious window where if you focus on the lower and middle class, you could... ugh Im just thinking out loud. I really feel lost trying to get this to work.
The problem with this episode is that it upholds the untrue idea that uplifting is a bad idea. It's capitalist realism and a bandaid for the Fermi paradox If you are post-plantary and post-scarcity and find intelligent life it is your obligation to give them the opportunity to learn from you and join the galactic community. It wouldn't take more than a few months maybe years at most to acclimate. To say otherwise like this episode or in star trek with the "prime directive" is just cope. Even if that was the policy you wouldn't be able to stop groups who want to help, and in post-plantary post-scarcity it only takes that one group. Just educate the population and let those who don't want to join be left alone (but let any descendents of them who want to join the galactic community be allowed to)
I think you have a point. The problem presented in this video happens when the government of the native population is given the replicators which inevitably results in catastrophe due to the corrupt politicians and elites wanting to remain in power by hoarding the replicators and using them personal gain and political dominance. But if what they did is send a message to everyone offering the natives to become citizens of the Federation instead, they won't have to worry about the corrupt politicians and elites who would then lose all their power. However, I admit that some of the corrupt politicians and elites would act like Humpty Dumpty and prevent the people from leaving their government so some people would get injured and die at first. But ultimately, this is the best path with the least bloodshed.
Has human history given any successful examples of this? Even benevolent attempts to make contact as you suggest still have problems. No government would allow this to occur, to their people which would then mean that the UFP or Planetary Union would have to take over that government in the process and thus be imperialists. People once thought that the distributed internet would be a force for good in a similar fashion. How'd that work out?
It would take several generations to rid a civilization of destructive profit and status seeking behaviour. However, the rich and powerful members of a capitalist society dictate the cultural norms, and they often make self-biased assumptions about the rest of their species ("It's a dog eat dog world, everybody wants what I have") which turn out to be false. Working class and middle class people often don't have any greed or motivation to rise above everyone else. Greed, afrer all, is a disease, a special condition, not the basic instinct like self preservation.
@ I don't think you understand the situation. There is no possibility of resistance. Even a single ship could show up and over power the combined might of the planet. The governments would have absolutely no say in the matter, read my other comment for some examples. All they would have to do would be to come by and make their presence known, which wouldn't be hard, they could hack into the internet, news stations, etc, or drop a few ambasitor robots down that can speak every language or fly low enough in the sky to be seen accross different regions of large populations or a combination of those or something else entirely. Then they would explain who they are and what their technology is and help us quickly become post planetary ourselves, by teaching us how to do it and working together with us in the process and leaving anyone alone who does not wish to join while easily disabling any threats or government structures that would impede the process out of self serving reasons. It would be entirely voluntary who wanted to join or not, and everyone would have the opportunity without anyone being able to stop those who want to or force those who do not. Give humanity a few months/years to get used to their presence (we adapt very quickly to new status quo I don't think it would take more than even a week or two, maybe a month for humanity to acclimate to the unambiguous presence of intelligent alien life offering us help and a place in the galactic community, even communities in the global south would acclimate) *TL;DR they would give us the ability to stop destroying ourselves and come together and join the galactic community, with those who want to be left alone for whatever reasons the space to do so with the opportunity to change their mind or for future generations to either stay or leave, in order to maintain cultural relevance and history.*
The condescending arrogance of "it happened to this planet, so we are certain it will happen to everyone else" stinks of crypto capitalism. We all dream to live in that universe yet assume we would be part of the federation. Imagine Q grants you your wish and you wake up on that planet, knowing the neighboring star system lives in paradise.
If a person were to come up with the idea of something akin to a matter synthesizer, they would be disappeared by their government and their schematics seized or destroyed.
The one point you made I disagree with most would be the idea that land could be redistributed. I believe any government that would seize control of land wouldn't have the best interest of the people in mind.
Two questions: -what if the matter synthesizer was introduced as open source. In a simple enough design and instruction that anyone with a basic tool know how could make it. Would this prevent it from being hoarded by the elites? - Would having this technology really change human nature to form factions and create conflict? You'd think resource scarcity is the root of all conflict but I'm willing to bet people would still find stuff to fight about.
Would make conflicts less likely to happen. Its speculated the first wars were fought over fertile land due to the introduction of agriculture. Battles happen yeah but no wars due to population
@@jdurrant5633 The only true ways to prevent wars would be to permanently disable certain aspects of human nature through either druglike means or genetic personality engineering, and I'm not sure which sounds more like a dystopian film.
Your points and analysis are spot on. I absolutely love The Orville in no small part because they are not afraid of tackling the little questions. Buckminster Fuller proclaimed years ago that there was no need for everyone to have a job. The book "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graber is an excellent ancillary source of supporting material. I would also suggest (having not looked at the other videos on your channel this may sound stupid. I'm not but I do have a bit of the lazy.) you binge the entirety of the television show "The Good Place" a couple of times. The Universe don't care where you get your philosophy.
If replicators would be introduced tomorrow everybody would synthesize so much stuff that we would run out of landfills . The landfills where said replicators get the matter from needed to do the synthesis . Which would basically be a re-arrangement of pre-existing atoms into new molecules and re-arrangement of said molecules into new stuff. So the stuff from landfills would be the new scarcity. Billionaires would own whole landfills, poor people only own their own garbage that then can be re-arranged again and again. A book becomes a MP3 player, then a cellphone, then a bicycle and so on. Sounds like perfect minimalism: you own 1000kg of stuff which you can resynthesize again and again. If everybody wants something made of iron, at the same time, and the stuff repositories run out of iron: replicator replies with "sorry no bicycle today, want something not made of iron?"
An interesting thing is that people talked about 3D printers in the same way, before most people could buy one. Of course it's a difference between a 3D printer and a replicator, but even if some one like Elon decide to hold on to this technology, it will be hard to keep it for them self's. And when the hacker community have built on, they can build more and more. Also when the world leaders know that they need to find a way to tackle the climate, and they can do it by deny foreign countries the income from export, it's a temptation to not produce one to every one. I don't think people will die because people build weapons, but because people don't need to leave the home and meet a partner. A person will not need any one else, to meet their needs.
This video gave me so much food for thought. Countless people who discovered new medicine did not think of becoming Jeff bezoes of their time. Instead they want to make it affordable. Yet today our new techs were heavily invested by billionaires and corporations, and the only thing they care about is profit. The days of new inventions for everyone is probably long gone.
the point that kelly makes in the episode reminds me of a show called "my 600 pound life" where the doctor that performs the gastric bypass insists that the patients first drop 100 lb on their own; explaining that getting the surgery will only make matters worse if you don't first address the underlying issues. same for that world that wiped itself out!
but potable water isn't common or easily available to everybody. Its naturally scarce. 15:59 That's what these shows always get wrong, they assume some great change in humanity will happen, but this is the real fantasy. We haven't significantly changed in 10,000 years. What is two hundred? This is actually something Orville did a good job of showing, they're just as petty, vengeful, and as self-destructive as we are today.
@jingthethief how is water natural scarce? It isn't evenly disturbed, most water isn't drinkable, it has many uses from drinking, to bathing, to laundry, to agriculture, to industry. Even theorically drinkable water is often rendered unsafe by animal waste. Not everybody who needs water lives near a drinkable spring or stream. Other sources of water, like wells, require a lot of labor and are finite.
@@s0ulwindNo, we have definitely changed. Look at the society before us and look at us now. Of course we aren't the best, but we are far better than we were in the past.
I think we don't even have to imagine what if we had such a device. The the OpenSource world is probably the closest thing to a post-scarcity world we have seen. There's a giant world of people working and sharing their work for free. It's a world where you can have anything you want at no cost, take it, make it your own, modify it and share it back. I don't think we're anywhere near ready outside the digital world, but seeing it makes you hopeful that we can have a future like that if scarcity becomes a thing of the past.
I once read the published notebooks of Buckminster Fuller, from about 1930. He said that the technology of the day could provide everyone in the world with all the necessities of life -- energy, food, housing, etc. All we needed was a world government capable of managing it. Unfortunately we never got such a government.
Fascinating video! Here are my thoughts: 1: It's true that capitalist businesses are incentivized to maximize profit - this is axiomatic. But this profit incentive pushes capitalist businesses in a free market to create abundance, not scarcity (as you claim). Just think about it: if you can make money by selling a product, then the more products you sell the more money you make. So why wouldn't you sell as much as possible? The answer to this question is that there is an alternative profit maximizing strategy that's even better than creating abundance - creating a monopoly. A monopoly business will make more profit than a business operating in a free market by creating artificial scarcity and increasing prices. But this monopoly business strategy has a fatal flaw: in a free market someone will start competing against you and take away your excess profits. The solution to this problem (from the business point of view) is to get the government involved. Only a government has the power to prevent competitors from entering your market. So in the long term, monopolies and artificial scarcity can only exist while government keeps a choke-hold on free markets. Remove the government and you'll still have scarcity, but at the "natural" levels. Free market capitalism creates abundance, not scarcity. And this isn't just in theory. Real world data clearly shows that the countries with the highest standards of living also have the strongest property rights and the most free markets. Like democracy, capitalism isn't perfect but it's still better than everything else we've tried. 2. There's no reason to think that synthesizers would end capitalism and destroy the economy. Capitalism has survived many disruptive technologies in the past and only come out stronger. All that synthesizers would do is make most material goods much cheaper (but still not completely free since some raw materials and energy would still be needed). Many technologies have done this in the past without killing capitalism. But that still leaves the entire service economy for capitalism to operate within. For example, if I want a doctors appointment the synthesizer can't make that for me. I still have to go see an actual doctor and pay them for their work. 3. While the synthesizer is fantasy, we're on the cusp of a real technology that will be almost as good. Think about what the synthesizer does: it creates anything you want out of raw atoms and energy. We could achieve exactly the same result if we had AI's controlling robot factories. Just like we tell the synthesizer what we want and it creates it for us, an AI controlling a robot factory could do the same thing. Sure it wouldn't have cool sound effects and it would be slower, but the outcome would be the same - ask the machine for almost anything and it gives it to you. These discussions are not just theoretical. Soon we will be seeing the results of a synthesizer-like technology play out in the real world.
Well firstly, monopolies strive to destroy free markets by whatever means necessary, either by direct physical violence (without government regulation not being available) or regulatory capturing (with government regulation being available). Then, why would the doctor need to be paid money? What would they do with it, considering that all goods are free? Besides, many people become doctors because they want to help people, not because they want to make money. Also, who do you think makes the government? Originally the government was organized by local landowning nobles who wanted someone to mediate between them. Isn't it always the ones who demand more free markets, who demand tougher and stronger police states and oppose the state only when it harms the profit rates (as in, modern European or east-Asian welfare state for example)?
Problem with that approach however, is that such radical libertarianism often falls prey to outside influence. Additionally Monopolies are not only enforced by patent rights and such (honestly with some technologies absolutely the case), they can also be enforced by the industries themselves. See gilded age USA for further information on how that can escalate for certain technologies. The existence of Government can thus due to external influence not be discarded. Someone needs to run the military and police force at the very least. Anarchocapitalism would only end up creating a military force to fill the vacuum, or invite foreign powers. Once government exists, it can be used. And it will always be the wealthy who use and abuse Government, because power begets power, with the only countermeasure being some other deciding factor than pure power, which is the reason why democracy works. Because public approval all of a sudden actually matters for those in power. Keep in mind, that if you do not have government control over the economy, public approval all of a sudden doesn't matter for that huge source of power in society, leading to the predatory economy seen, again, in gilded age America. This is then my argument why capitalism doesn't inherently create Abundance for the average Individual: -Capitalist Businesses desire Profit -Capitalist Businesses corner market -Eventually some Market limit is reached. Only so much food can be consumed. -Expansion impossible, thus prices are raised and worker salaries reduced to increase profits, and businesses in the same market are attacked. -Without sufficient Oversight, these Opponents are removed (dependent on Oversight this ranges from basically warlords taking over opposition territory to hostile takeovers to quiet understandings; patent tricks etc.), based on the fact that power begets power. -Now the majority of the actual population has no alternatives to the big corporations for either price or work, resulting in low pay and high prices. Now some people would say 'Thus communism!' but that doesn't seem to work either. I believe a strong democratic state with complete control over infrastructure would be best; Those industries where benefits to society outweigh potential should not be part of capitalism. Also patent laws should be less restrictive than the current US for certain (fk those people gaming the system to get like 70 year patents, that should NOT be allowed). I would also like to see how large worker cooperatives work out, but there are not all too many examples of that yet.
They create abundance, but only in a negative way. Businesses make things that break, things that need to update, things that make you pay them more. Every business that has tried to make unbreakable things went bankrupt. Nokia is a good example, while it still exists, it’s no longer making unbreakable products (speaking from the experience of a Nokia user, their phones are the worst now). True abundance would be that nothing breaks, nothing needs to be replaced 5 years later. Which isn’t a thing, thus entre manufactured scarcity (as in, you need to buy new things because the old things don’t last long).
@makhnothecossack4948 Direct physical violence isn't a good idea for a company's public image. Plus the competition can also use direct physical violence which will be counter productive and more costly then just competing by reducing price. Monopolies cannot exist without a governing entity preventing competition. Also a government is a monopoly since there's no other entity competing against it.
There's a story going round that over a hundred years ago, Tesla came up with the idea of free energy. JP Morgan and friends then shut it down saying: "if you can't put a meter on it, we don't want it (because we can't profit from it)". Over 100 years later, nothing's changed. Scarcity still rules.
There's a chance you use that technology today in your mobile phone, or if you shop. There is a misunderstanding of what was meant by "free energy". It isn't free production of of energy, it's about the method of transmission. Instead of using wires to send energy, the air is flooded with electrical energy, that can then be captured using a simple coil of wire. So the energy is free in the sense that it is free from the wires. It is also free because you can't tell who is using that power, so you can't charge for it. If you are using a wireless charger on your phone, that is what you are doing. The charging station produces a very small energy field, and you have a small coil in your phone that picks up that charge. But the field extends less than an inch. When you go shopping and you see those security tags, they are the same system. A small low level field is set up around the exit and powers a small transmitter in the tag. But there are a vast number of problems with this. It is incredibly inefficient, most of the power simply bleeds away. And that inefficiency goes up exponentially with the size of the field. So, to send 1kwh 50 miles would take more energy than is produced in the sun. It also still requires resources to produce the power, but had no way of charging for it, so any energy company using this would instantly go out of business, because it would be running at 100% loss. Free is never free.
This excellent video made me subscribe to your channel. I always dreamed about to live in Star trek future, where the value of human is defined by his actions not money he have.
thanks for highlighting this show. nice to hear that something interesting got made. the non-intervention policy is silly, though; because capitalism is constantly disrupting and immiserating society with new innovations. It's like the daft trots who say Soviet Russian expansion westward at the end of WW2 was bad because it 'wasn't the self-liberation of the working class'. a nation or planet having that tech introduced by a outside communist force would have a much bigger chance of faring well than if it were introduced by a monopoly capitalist. Obviously a extent of timing and development is required - it's harder to introduce the most developed tech to the least developed places.
3:40 bottled water is so stupid. I have my own filter and my own bottles. When you pay for water to your water company you're really just paying for the service, not for the water.
Well you do pay for the water but in the amounts you drink it comes to mere pennies. I bought Hydroflasks for the wife and I a few years ago and we just fill them with ice and water all the time. Even at $50 each they’ve paid for themselves at least a couple times over vs buying flats of water at Costco. Never mind spending $1 or more per bottle at a gas station or something.
Marcus im so glad i found this video since orville is one of my all time favorite shows and this episode in specific was probably my favorite. I even thought of a follow up episode regarding the character Lysella. The episode would touch on her trying to integrate into society on the orville but find it rather hard since she is from a planet which is basically in the 21st century of its evolution. Meaning she would have 21st century views and every time she would say something the rest of the crew would find it weird or unsettling. Much like how the Moclans have that ritual where they get rid of females. This would alienate Lysella and she would feel lonely maybe even depressed. On top of this she would have a hard time finding a job on the orville that isnt practically being a janitor because she would not have the expertise, education or even augmentations like the other crew members have. Some might even see her as a pet. I think this would touch on a lot of interesting subjects about time travel and society in general. like for instance how people wish they could go into cryo sleep and wake up 1000 years later, be careful what you wish for since you might find yourself in an alien world where you just wouldnt fit in. It would be like taking a guy from the 18's and putting him in todays society, he would probably lose his mind.
@@baronbrummbar8691 Lets say humans live for 80 years, what if we had a living space that didnt get repetitive after exploring it for more than half an hour? Its not just our Biological needs that matter, as has been addressed in the movie too. what i mean is, the living space was rather limited (in scale, based on Rats physical size) that ended up causing an issue for the rats. CalHoun'ss rat experiment also expected to see similar cases in Real life scenario on humans too, which, Often outright Contradicted the expected behaviour. People behaved in the opposite of behavioral sink theory.
@@time-for-ecopaydar2858 no you doen´t understand what happend vast amounts of the living space was untouched all of the mice ... in the beginning the kmice spread then they stopped to spread and fought over areas even if they had more then enough place to spread and the mice also wheren´t exploring ... and that is what the interesting part was why fight for something that is highly contested when ther is alot of space somewhere else and the amount of food is also greater somewhere else
9:14 Yes 100% agree. A great example in fiction of a vital technology being made exclusive/ scarce, are the AutoDocs in the film Elysium. A machine that can cure any disease, infirmity, and make you basically immortal. Being exclusively for the richest while the vast majority of humanity dies of preventable causes. The tech is great but its utilization and restriction by a society that favors personal wealth and achievement over the betterment of all ppl, renders its greatness ineffective.
the only way the synthesizer would be able to take hold is if it could be hidden in your pocket, was self powered, able to make a copy of itself and the parts for a larger version, and came with a massive catalogue of items it could make. a star trek style transporter though? just one of those in the right hands could change the world.
I actually love the whole "reputation is what makes you rich" because it wasn't possible before but now, yes, we can make a record that's more or less public and represents us and in fact, this is what we do with the internet anyways, though it's not always a great thing. But much like before larger society we have been operating like that.
true, but also poverty is from the ignorance of the poor. Poverty is a state of mind as much as anything. The poorest can either live as if their rich with the right mental attitudes or let their poor mental attitude keep them in their state of poverty. We see this changing all the time.
Pronouncing scarcity wrong is one thing, but ignoring that this was the point of Star Trek is unforgivable😂. Further, we will never escape resource allocation discrepancies because even in a society with nearly no material scarcity - social scarcity will step in. In fact, in the society of the Orville they still have to work hard to compete for technical accolades in order to get the job they want (aka the life they want). In the end, some people will always be born more able to attain the scarce things and that ability will snowball. We already see this with influencer "value" on social media.
FINALLY someone who understands that currency is still currency no matter if it's money, materials, time or reputation or such AND that competence matters in attaining the said currency.... THANK YOU.... Most other weirdos here work on the false premise that resources/currencies existing also means they own it without taking it... Or deserve as much as the ones working hard to get more.
Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom does a really cool job of expanding on this social (or rather, creativity+purpose) scarcity in a post-material-scarcity world. It's also a murder mystery at a time when you can't die because consciousness backups are a thing...
@Kira110lol It is because our education system has been deluded by a Marxist takeover. The most reflexive heuristic in Marxism is "historical materialism" and so much of what passes for intelligent thought these days is simply applying that heuristic to some given subject matter. It is a tedious and often brain dead excersise. The point of Marxism isn't to educate but to awaken the critical consciousness and make revolutionaries. Which means society must suffer brain dead take after toxoplasmotic take as the little ideologues the system cranks out run around doing thier one trick.
@@Kira110lol Not what anyone's saying, but you keep right on declaring victory against the evil strawmen. I'm sure the billionaires will reward you for your devotion, any day now.
@ Your stupid comment proves mine was not a strawman. Your comment is a pathetic attempt to insult me AGAIN working on the premise that people who have it better than you are EVIL ... With no logical argument... It's an argument built on your personal envy... Because you assume them having more than you means it is unfair to you. Thanks for proving me right again 😂
As a permanently disabled person I dream of this. If an alien ship took me and said you can never go back to your world. I would say peace out. Humans are cavemen. We are all about greed and corruption. We are selfish and we only care about now. Not the future. I grew up watching Star Trek and hoping humans would strive to get to that point. But now we have a cult in the USA and we have wars constantly. We could feed everyone but it isn't profitable. We could house and educate everyone but it isn't profitable. We are going to destroy our society and we will either end up like Star Trek in another 1,000 years or we will wipe humans off this planet. I don't see humans evolving to a type one civilization anytime soon. I mean just look at the USA and its Oligarchy. We are about to be in a depression and food shortage. Not because we are desperate and can make food but because it will not be picked and it will rot on the ground. We are about to destroy ourselves in the USA. Maybe Canada or China will take over and save us. Because Trump isn't going to help us at all.
I am confident that the way you present yourself is not accurate, you present as someone who wants to do nothing but suck the resources from others and never contribute anything yourself. Others of us cannot live like that. We must do something, for me, I want to create nifty things. Creativity is needed to keep me sane. The nature of people will never change, we are all evil, will always be that way, Star Trek and the like denies that, they are wrong. We need a system that allows evil people to get along, no system has been as successful as capitalism at doing that. There is no substitute for merit based rewards. Just look at all the persons who were not disabled yet have disabled themselves with recreational drugs.
The 40 hour workweek came in around 1940, not 1925 - so we got that form of abundance. And most work isn't hard physical labor any more. And food costs about half as much as it used to, as percent of disposable income. And there's a bunch of free stuff that people don't take advantage of because they prefer paying for convenience - like paying for internet and pricey cell data plans instead of getting a cheap service and using free wifi to download stuff to read or watch later. And a $150 smartphone will do all the essential stuff and most of the 'fun' stuff of a $1000 phone. I don't think we have artificial scarcity - it's just that people tend to spend most of what they earn, and demand more than they used to be able to get.
We definitely have some artificial scarcity in some markets. OPEC can increase production and drive down prices of oil worldwide when they want to(As they did in 2020 while we were in shutdown in an attempt to crush our oil companies, which worked pretty well), or they can slow down production which lowers the amount available and drives prices of oil up, so can our own oil barons. In Canada, the maple syrup industry is controlled by a cartel, who can do the same type of thing oil companies can to control prices. In the US's housing market, wallstreet companies have bought up homes and apartment complexes they just sit on, refusing to put them on the market for sale or rent, to create artificial scarcity, so they can increase the rents of the units they do offer to the public, which shockingly and nonsensically, makes them more profit than renting all their units at a more affordable rate.
Advertisement is propaganda meant to make you think that you have a lack that you need to fulfill by buying trash and it works. if it didn't, corporations would put millions and millions into it. Welcome to consumerism. that's why everyone hates it. Ads make you feel worse.
@@roofdogblues7400 I don't think those are the sort of systemic artificial scarcity that is being considered here? My impression is that the overall complaint is that the capitalist system 'forces' everyone to work just as hard as always, rather than being allowed to benefit from the level of automation we already have achieved. And it's probably also about how some benefit a lot more despite not working longer or harder. So my point above was that while 'the system' does indeed 'trap' everyone into working, we have benefited a lot. If we had frozen our standard of living at a 1925 level and focused on working less, maybe by now we could have a three day (maybe even two day?) work-week. Though that assumes technology would have progressed as fast, despite somehow putting our standard of living into stasis. However, it does feel like 'this time really is different'. The USA might not feel the full impact for the next few years, due to manufacturing re-shoring and Boomers retiring and maybe reduced immigration. But within five years - probably sooner - we'll start to feel unemployment pressure and resulting recession/depression risk, forcing adoption of a UBI not just for humanitarian reasons, but in order to maintain demand for goods and services to keep the economy from collapsing.
This is also why when we imagine any hyper advanced civilizations irl, The Kardechev scale. any that controls all the resources and energy from their home planet is known as a type 1, a type 2 like you've pointed out here, is when a civilization controls all the energy from their star. scientists look for light fluctuations from stars, basically hinting at dyson spheres which is basically a spherical solor panel but just covers the whole star and takes every bit of energy it produces. so even in the future where matter synthesizer exist, energy is still limited, even if its quantity is many, meaning that such thing would have to exist to regulate the use of synthesizers so they can be used at least mostly optimally.
Post Scarcity is a Paradox. Even if machines could transmute random matter into Food the machines still need fuel and repairs. People may have more access to food, Healthcare and technology but they won't have infinite Time, they can't live forever.
It's not a paradox, but it is almost certainly very hard to happen. To reach post scarcity, we would need near-limitless energy. The laws of thermodynamics rule out the possibility of truly limitless energy, but near-limitless is still possible and can bring about post-scarcity. Energy is the one limiter to everything being scarce. WIth abundant energy, almost anything can be made at almost no expense. People don't comprehend that when we "work" we're just transforming energy into production. We turn the food we eat into energy, which we use to move our muscles to work and produce. Our society just commoditized energy into a measurable unit: money.
@@HVBRSoF Alternatively we'd have to reach a very high level of automation. If energy generation, manufacturing of necessary goods, and the routine maintenance of those systems was fully automated, then you could achieve a system indistinguishable from a post-scarcity system provided it is not overwhelmed by overpopulation. It goes back to the old question about who works in Utopia? The slaves of course, but here you replace slaves with robots which is considerably more ethical.
@silly_kitty170Studying animals that live social groups shows even they have hierarchical power structure too. You can take an ape out of the troop, but you can't take the troop out of the ape. This is just another part of the darkside of the human condition. Even if we could some how magically get rid off the hierarchical power structure. Humans are just going to make a new one, intentionally or accidentally.
@silly_kitty170Humans evolved over the course of three million years to be hierarchical predatory pack hunter/gatherers. Even if we still to the half million years where humans have been definitively modern humans, the evolutionary instincts of 25,000 generations can’t be undone in a generation or two. Hell, civilization as we know it only emerged about 6000 years ago - 300 generations - and we still haven’t fully adapted to it. The lives we’ve chosen for ourselves are *not* the ones evolution chose for us, and most of our angsty issues and anomie and depression and aggression are the result of us living an inherently unnatural lifestyle, at odds with the niche we evolved for. It can’t really be helped though. We’re stuck with the choices our stone-aged ancestors made
Great video! I always get tears in my eyes when i see a SciFi show where they beat capitalism! Live could be so amazing... BTW awesome news that the next season is still in the making!! i almost lost hope...
You can't beat capitalism. You can only beat human nature. But that is an endeavor that is near impossible to achieve because people don't like change.
Man, Besides the great concepts that you were able to see in that show, I just want to congratulate you for your grar investigation, Im new to this channel bur already a fan. Keep up the amazing work, its inspiring
As a socialist we want to provide people with meeting their material conditions. However, due to the fact that we'stern cou'ps, and inco'mpetent leader ship, socialism has never had the opportunity to work and thrive. Ive been studying it for two years now, and i can tell people it changed how i saw socialism and capitalism. Socialism has been scientifically proven to be better at meeting peoples needs than capitalism so yea.
The Soviet Union, as imperfect as it was, already worked. Remember, the USSR took the majority of the damage in WWII, and were the defenders of the cold war.
Thing is socialism has thrived, in places like china where the primary decision is not made for profit but for the country and people. this isn't even mentioning the many wonders and scientific achievement socialist countries have managed. the USSR started the space race, the US only joined as a response to the fact the soviets were doing it. even today china has some of the worlds largest dams and wonders being built continuously. and the primary difference from capitalism to socialism in our context simply is what is the primary decision maker of the country, do people or profits come first? is this country beholden to the liberal world orderor do they make their science-based decisions for the good of their people? socialism is scientifically better in the simple fact it can accurately work with and guide more variables in their given countries precisely, like a top down military unit command game where you can observe and control all within a given space. this control is paramount is exactly why the players can be competitive in the game. same applies to real life. this can simply seen in medical data and the amount of doctors per capita in the USSR versus even the richest capitalist countries at their peak. Also meaning projects of all kinds have the actual means of getting completed without the chaos of the market stifling and ruining any projects that happen in the country. privately owned or not, all answer the state which protects the people and country in such places. Or likean amaing lawyer with laws putting the people first without being bought out, like an 80s movie villain who loses because the country actually had and kept enforcable laws that protected the protagonist or what they were intending to defend. exactly why regulations in capitalist countries are for, only more expanded and directed not by possibly corrupted organizations and people. so no more decades-old train infrastructure that never gets completed, but fast paced, organized and precise production. no more just listening to what organizations beholden to capitalist influence and power but actual acted upon means of verifying information and the safe testing out for the good of the people in your country. socialism as a science and is never stagnant. meaning just relying on older texts won't do the absolute best for prospective students. good for foundations and history of course but it's ever changing and students need to be on top of such if they wish to not be tricked by capitalist misinformation and narratives, which unfortunately are extremely common and the exact reason why are so many people resistant to even learning more about it.
I highly recommend watching Yanis series: In the Eye of the storm. Are we about to turn the corner towards a post scarcity society? And also look into The Venus Project.
It's not hard to imagine what would happen if people did not work with their needs met. We already have a part of society that is exactly that. People who retire and have saved enough to continue their existing lifestyle. You will have people that do nothing, while others volunteer or invest time and effort in things they like.
Might be worth looking into trials of UBI. Overwhelmingly, people like to feel useful and have structure to their lives. The main difference is that they do work they actually like.
Another, group slightly different group who don't have to work to meet their basic needs, are the first nations in Canada, who get subsites from the government (basically a UBI. In those communities there is rampant tragedy where everyone is addicted to something and many take their own lives. It seems that without the need to find resources and engage in mutually beneficial endeavors with other humans, we waste away, drowned in our own hedonistic tendencies, and die. You can also see this in the kids of celebrities' and rich in the USA, with no point left in their life (all the money they could want right from the start) they tend toward self deletion and addiction. So why don't we see that in large numbers in the retired folks but do in these other cases? Maybe because the retired folks had to work for a lifetime to get where they are and it wasn't just handed to them. There really does seem to be something necessary for human mental health that is found in putting in effort to get what we need/want.
@@paulgibbon5991I mean, in the Orville they work for passion, but work in an organisation that helps them feel useful and productive without the cons of fears of losing your livelihood.
@@lexpox329 Yeah, handouts will inevitably foster a culture of inferiority and, on some level, resentment which does not lend well to mental health. Here in the US, the Navajo suffer from addiction and high suicide rates as well. On an interpersonal level, there is a way to avoid this. If you see someone who needs money, but don't want to harm their sense of self-worth by giving them a handout, what you can do is hire them to do something for you. It doesn't have to be something huge and something you really need to hire someone to do, but as long as its plausible enough, you can help them and avoid the sense of inferiority and resentment the recipient (thru no fault of their own) would feel as a result. After all, who's going to turn down a job that seems very well-paying for what it is? And there is the added psychological benefit in that they feel they've earned the money rather than just being given it out of pity. The trick is how you would apply this to entire groups of people.
Something to add to this is that if purpose is driven by passion then nobody needs to criticise anything. Currently money dictates that only 1 entity should be the victor; therefore we all feel the need to have a say. The alternative is to risk studying years only to have our employment rejected. Capitalism is competition. Conflict is part of the design.
i like the plot of thease sci-fi show i absolutly hate the shuttle desigh where the center of thrust is WAY above the center of mass, the shuttles would spiral uncontrolably. not to mention in the first few episodes where the three destroys the krill ship and 2/3 of the engines are destroyed AND THE SHIP STILL FLYS STRAIGHT
It's space, nothing is straight. And since they have different tech, I'd say the way they propel themselves is powered in a way that doesn't destroy the thruster. Plus it is sci fi so let's have fun with weird ahh designs
There are 2 main problems with the argument presented by The Orville: 1) Technology never comes *after* we're prepared for it. In all cases throughout history, the technology comes first, and *then* society changes as a result. If we need to wait for society to be prepared for a revolutionary technology, we will literally never get that technology. But that's not how it works, it's always the exact opposite. 2) The technology itself renders the problem moot. There would be no realistic scenario where someone hoards or gatekeeps a technology like the matter synthesizer, because a matter synthesizer would be able to create more matter synthesizers. Even if a greedy billionaire has the only one in the world, they have friends and family who they will want to give one to, which they can do with the push of a button for free. And those people have yet more friends and family they want to give one to. So eventually it will spread exponentially throughout society in this way. Even in the most extreme case where the greedy billionaire doesn't give one to anyone else, they will eventually die and someone else will have it. Eventually someone will start the distribution process. But most likely it will start right away. A technology that self-replicates for free is not something that can be realistically contained. However, that also means that evil people will have access to the technology as well. So we could very well end up destroying ourselves as a result of it, but the reason will not be because people are fighting for control of the technology itself, but rather because of the fact that literally everyone will have access to it.
The paranoia and unfounded bias against profit is pretty annoying. I too yearn for a post scarcity society, but we don’t get there by vilifying people who have created massive value and succeeded. Capitalism is being blamed for atavisms endemic to human nature.
Scarcity is the essence of value and appreciation. Without scarcity there will be boredom, decadence, and lack of appreciation. Happiness is the mental phenomenon when scarcities are gradually met with fulfillment. The ideal state of harmony is when scarcities are constantly arises and fulfilled. This is the universal law of harmonious entropy. Not lopsided to any one end of either scarcity and abundance.
I think you've been brainwashed by today's capitalist system. My sense of fullfilment has nothing to do with satisfying my material desires and I think/ hope a good portion of the population will think the same.
Halo was born to show human civilization to be an "after-Capitalist" civilization. But after Bungie... It all became a copy-past of America. 😑 Not in the sense there wasn't money as you probably imagine, but rather because the "Unified Earth Government" of Halo universe was literally a socialist interstellar civilization. That don't preclude the existance of corporations, free market or else, but it poses concrete and neat limits to what these things can do and how can they affects the human society. Through lore of Halo you can see how Healthcare was not just free, but even spanned and was offered to ALL the colonies. On Earth, the center of that human Civilization, people didn't knew what cancer is. They had access to fresh food, jobs, every kind of transport system, journalism fluorished over every colony, as we got news from journalists of the time, from remote colonies, about terrorist attacks. So freedom of speech, information and opinion was a right granted by the UEG not just on Earth, but throughout the whole hunan space. Military service was voluntary, only voluntary. No conscription. Also politics was quite denocratic by having delegations and representatives of every colonies partecipating to the Senate of Earth. In the decision-maker institution of such nation. Of course that could have also been not fair, since bigger colonies had more representatives than small colonies, but nonetheless all had their respesentation in the government. All had the chance to get elected or even to run for the charge of President of the Unified Earth Government. And that's real democracy. No matter how small a colony could have been, it had that chance. Ironically, through the UEG history, they had to face wars started by the major ideologies that still today tries to rule our world: the Rain Wars in South America waged by the Koslovich communist forces. The Mars campaign against Frieden fascist forces. And the Insurrection wars against capitalists in the most remote colonies of UEG space. After the Human-Covenant War that constitute the bulk of the story of the first trilogy of games, capitalists actually had the chance to enstablish their power over a single planet and get their independence from UEG. And that planet/colony is Venezia. But unlike other sci-fi titles where war is always the answer, in Halo there's a rather peaceful coexistance even there. With Venice left alone by UEG that sincerely don't want to mess up with the Colony. Problem is that Venezia is also an hotbed for not just insurrectionists but also post-Covenant factions where Humans and Alien species mix togheter creating an unique society. While in the UEG, communities of mixed Humans and Aliens are welcomed in the consessus of Human worlds like normal colonies. It means that despite the genocidal camoaign of the Covenant against Earth and her colonies, the UEG is actually granting rights and citizenship even to those same Aliens they had as enemies in the previous war. It may look insane, but it's also very propositive. Very healthy. Because it's not just democracy at its finest, it shows moral values, the will to build a better future for all, mercy, respect for life... I mean, all those things you expect to come from a true democratic government. But of course, Halo is a wargame, it needs crisis to live up. So there must be elements of destabilization. Some of these are factions that lies both inside and outside the UEG. Outside for example we have the Banished. A group of raiders and pirates that pursuit true freedom through violence. Terrorists as we define them. Inside UEG there's the ONI. That after the Human-Covenant War have growth paranoid about what aliens can do and are now willing to cripple and destroy every potential alien power that could treat the UEG. And techbically speaking, it's not even the entirety of the Office of Naval Intelligence but rather just one of its Divisions. The dark and obscure "Section-Three" that its tasked with soecial projects and initiatives to protect Earth and its colonies. So it's a dynamic universe where there are contrasting and contrapposed forces that are not necessarely "evil" or "good" but just "human". To me, there's no greater sci-fi title than Halo. It's the absolute best.
I read about scientific breakthroughs all the time. Solar cells that are stronger, engines that are cleaner or more efficient, etc. Political macinations keep them from ever seeing the light of day. 💔
Truly sorry for my butchering of 'scarcity'!
I'm curious though, and genuinely want to know: If money came to an end and reputation was our new currency, what would you do with your time?
Great question! If money ceased to be and reputation became the new currency, I’d continue focusing on what brings me joy and allows me to contribute meaningfully to both individuals and the collective. For me, that means chasing creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving in ways that add value to others’ lives while feeling intrinsically fulfilling. Reputation as currency feels like an invitation to double down on purpose-driven pursuits-whether through deepening knowledge, collaborating with others, or simply offering acts of care and humor that uplift those around us. In essence, I’d lean into what lights my own path and, hopefully, makes the journey a little brighter for others too
No matter synthesizer is gonna raise my kids to be decent humans, so that's what I primarily would do with my time.
Try to get a better reputation!
And it wouldn't be easy, for reason having mostly to do with an unpleasant, difficult-at-best personality. A system like that would put an even higher premium on social skills than our own society already does. For many, that would be fine. But if you're neurodivergent, wired awkward, and find social interaction difficult.......
Time? Raising a great family, civics, morals, build a better AI (build knowledge/wisdom), fitness, and tinker with both developing strains of beautiful guppies and tasty tomatoes. Perhaps even jump into architecture for a beautiful and function balance.
You watched the wrong sci-fi. You should watch the Matt Damon movie "Elysium", because that's the future our society is heading towards.
Your English is actually so good, that I assumed I was hearing a native speaker mispronounce a common word intentionally.
Lol. I just thought the person did not know how to pronounce scarcity correctly. Similar to how different English speaking countries sometimes pronounce and/or spell some words differently than others. (I am looking at you - America)! Lol. :D :D
I thought the same thing. His pronunciation of everything else is really good. I thought he was a native speaker.
When things are scarce, then we have a scarcity. Get it?
He’s not American?! Wild.
@@kieranrollinson8750heck, not even countries but just individuals sometimes have a quirky word. English is my only conversational language and I get ribbed for how I pronounce a couple words.
I want to live in Scar City.
Post Scar City is better
“I’ve only seen it written” - Carter Pewterschmitt
Nah Simba City is way better
Nah, to deadly there. Imagine going to work and dying due to a ravager, charged creeper or vindicator.
Yes this is a HC reference
@@ShawnGBRmaybe Carter didn't look hard enough
I heard this form a political streamer. He pointed out that we have reached a high technological advancement but lack the social technology to deliver the benefits to the general population. He was spot on
That's because we live in a cyberpunk timeline now. High tech, but it really does nothing to improve society and is instead used to create cruel systems that dictate how people live and work.
We’re still at the point where we do need human labor for a good amount of things, so we wouldn’t be able to transition over to a “post-scarcity” system, not for a long while either
@@Da_maul In a lot of cases human labor is used because its cheaper, not necessarily because the technology to do mechanically doesn't exist
The way you pronounced "scarcity" just makes me think of the way Megamind says "Metrocity" instead of "Metro City"
Good video.
although the way you pronounce scarcity is killing me
You gotta be tough if you want to survive in... Scar City!
@ZachariahJ Long live the King!
I actually thought he said "star city" at first lol
He is a non-native English speaker, but his pronunciation is so good, in general, one does not think that. At first, I wondered whether this was a Canadian pronunciation with which I was unfamiliar.
@@LMinem Nowadays when I run into this sort of discrepancy I may suspect that I am listening to a bot of some sort, but anyone who reads a lot knows a bunch of words that they may not know how to pronounce. Or at least that is true for English.
Since you mention Wells: He has also a novel called "Men like gods" which is unfortunately not very well known. But it is probably one of my favourite depictions of an utopia in science fiction. The society in the novel works much similar in that all material needs are met but people still work for "reputation". the outside character asked one of the utopists what would happen when there is someone who just doesn't work to which the utopists replied that this would be a sad individual who wouldn't be able to find meaningful bonds with others because everyone else would be repulsed by it.
Jack London wrote a book about an author who wrote rejected book after rejected book, and no one wanted anything to do with him until he got one published and then everyone wanted everything he'd ever written.
It ends with the guy killing homself, because he realizes how fake everyone's esteem is.
"Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn.... A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?""
i make a video about how far we are from artificial intelligence 3d printing paradise machines making machines hhh
Unfortunately for me, working for money by working on what I love doesn't get me very much (but it is still something at least), but if all my needs were met and money wasn't necessary anymore, I would be quite happy.
I would work on the things I am passionate about, learn skills without having to worry about considering whether or not I have to take future earning and jobs into account, and just in general make myself happy doing what I do while also enriching other people's lives in doing what I am happy doing.
One thing I have learned in life is that doing work gives you purpose.
But doing work just to survive doesn't always give your life purpose.
how do you get something you desperately need from someone who doesnt need anything you have to offer? you dont welcome to the world where you have to do without if you dont have skills others want again if you think inequality is bad now create a system where those who have little or no skill to barter with and cant get what they need because they have to trade or beg for it and imagine those with enough skill and talent to dictate who can or cant get their time/service/product and calculate how many people you will have consigned to misery and death at the very bottom of your ideal society, you dont have to wait look to china and their social credit system to see what will happen
@@mouserr As productivity continues to go up, the number of people required to satisfy everyone's needs goes down. Eventually resulting in a Post-Scarcity economy where needs are taken care of by automation (including the automation needed to harvest the raw materials and create the parts it needs to build that automation). With a large enough number of the means of production, that the automation produces, there would literally be no cost
@@TechnoPagan87109 theres always a cost and in the lead up to your pipe dream how many millions will be sacrificed? you cant answer but you know people will die because they were of no value ... just like today
@@TechnoPagan87109 important to note that the amount of means of production isn’t all that helpful to us if the ownership of the means of production remains within the hands of like 10 people on earth.
"Doing work gives you purpose." As a semi-retired nurse practitioner, it's the reason for the 'semi'.
Your analysis of the social, economic and political impact of technological advances is relevant in today’s world as AI is becoming more mainstream stream. Thanks for this.
That becouse people like you never lived in comunism
This is why I read sci-fi -- it's a mirror into ourselves and often posits how our decisions as a society affect future generations, especially how technology changes everything for better and for worse simultaneously. For anyone wanting more insights into post-scarcity (scare-city), I suggest the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. It's a post-scarcity future with a lot of the same themes as this Orville episode, but in much more depth - what do people do in a society with no concept of money? The books don't have to be read in order, so I suggest starting with Player of Games.
Orville is made by people who 'get' Star Trek and dream of a better future.
You mean they "GET" the "VISION" and "PHILOSIOPHY" of Trek? The very REASON, Trek came into existence in the first place, which even, far, far, too, many Trek fans themselves, seem to miss??!! Well, if this is so, maybe I have always, misunderstood this show, as I always, thought it was a spoof on the Original Trek.
I thought it was made by Seth MacFarlane
Good/Evil ? Same as it ever was .
@@ivanj.conway9919. I think it originally was a spoof to get some traction because they couldn’t compete with Star Trek directly. They didn’t have the budget. But, they had some very good people behind the scenes.
@@sharongillesp : Interesting. I truly, did not know this show was still on the air. Is it? I have heard no talk of it for ages now.
“There was once a dream that was Democracy, you could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish.”
It is gone. Only Billionaires can buy the potus seat, and we all see where this leads to....ha! you deserve it.
@robertsolomielke5134 if that was true Kamala and her billion dollar budget would have won. She proves that money doesn't equal the seat, just as Hillery did in 16. They both had a bigger pot, and richer more connected billionaires, than the republicans have.
The issue is the democrats parties billion air donors is they have proven over many years that are terrible people that don't care one bit about its supporters.
I'm not a trim fan or hater. I just concentrate on what I see. I don't think his term this time will be good, but it will be better than the alternative that was offered by the waring party.
@@robertsolomielke5134 the majority still vote decided who to elect influence by billionaires yes may be. but still it's up to the common people as long as we are allowed to vote.
I'm so glad someone else recognizes the actual meaning of Post-Scarcity, After Capitalism. You're right. The reason they manufacture Drugs is to make money. That's the same reason they grow food, and why half it goes to waste each year. It's the same reason we build housing, which is why there is enough housing to take care of all the homeless, but they're still living in the street. There's no profit in taking care of people
Water is not a scarcity, drinkable water is. Less than 1% of water on Earth is drinkable. And we share that not only with other humans, but with plants and animals too. The synthesizer or replicator do not do not get rid of scarcity, they still need energy and raw resources. Artificial scarcity places a bottleneck to control the flow of resources. It can be done better, sure. It can be done worse, too. No resource is infinite. Some are more abundant than others, but they, too, have a limit.
@@therizinosaurus214 at a certain level of technology, it really is infinite. Or at least as infinite as we know the universe itself to be.
Homeless people are NOT homeless because of profit, they are homeless because they destroy homes ! This seems counterintuitive, but look at the Chicago Tenements. These public housing units were built for the poor and homeless, but once they were in them, they became over run by gangs, and the non-renters just trashed every unit, to the point that the only option left was to tear them down and try something else ! When the homeless are responsible enough to not destroy houses, then homes will be offered to them to rent, this isn't a huge leap, the problem is, how do you make someone do something they don't want to do ?
What's the point of "Taking care of someone" on someone else's money? You do realize no one stops you from taking care of anyone...
The problem is... You want to yell out loud for SOMEONE ELSE to take care of those, FOR FREE.
"There is enough housing to take care of all the homeless". Housing built and paid by who?
My money? Okay... How much of my money belongs to you and why?
(And since you all go crazy when reading the word "money", replace it with any resource of your choice. Time, energy, materials, etc)
@@therizinosaurus214 Synthesizers can make stuff from anything. You could throw shit in there and get water out of it
If I wasn't poor and working 12 hours a day to stay afloat, I'd be in a laboratory, working on the gyroscopic engine I have a concept for, and working on Waste Water Mitigation Systems, & Energy Recapture systems in our world.
If poverty wasn't keeping me down, my life would have and give so much more meaning to humanity.
See, she gets it!
Also dang, 12 hours? What the heck's goin' on over there??
Don't be discouraged, life is not about Great Big Things like inventing a revolutionary technology or working to some heroic end. Its about how you treat the people around you each and every day. Are you generous with what you have? I'm not talking about money, your most valuable resource is your time, attention, kindness. By this we will be measured once our lives on this planet are over. How we treat others is what matters, that is what the creator is looking for from us in this first phase that we call our "life". If we fail in this endeavor all we have to do is ask the creator to forgive our failures and he does, giving us more opportunities to act right by bringing more people into our lives that need our help in someway. There is a post scarcity reality, but its not on this plane of existence. Before we are ready to live in that utopia we have to pass through this plane of existence to learn the importance of being selfless and loving. And also of our own inability to actually be selfless and loving without asking the creator for help and for forgiveness for all the times we were greedy and unloving to our fellow humans. Then at the end of our lives when we are moved into the next reality we will be mature humans ready to learn the next thing the creator has for us.
Yet my Sister, you are worth as much as the wealthiest person on this planet. You are worth as much as any pope or king out there. The evil of capitalism linked to materialism, is that it makes people believe they are only WORTH, something if they HAVE STUFF, yet the MORE, you have the WORST, you are or tend to be anyway, usually. It does not buy Quality of Character and Spirit for sure, or breed a Quality Human Being, as that does and always has, come from WITHIN.
I am in the exact, same, boat, Sister, and I would change the world if I did not always, have to worry about merely, surviving.
Change will come, it must or we have no chance to survive.
Warmest Wishes from Canada. Out.
I work approximately 15 plus hours a day 😢
@@lexpox329What if the creator wants us to use our gifts in this life instead of just waiting for it to be over so we can finally be what he actually had in mind for us for this life?
To me this concept of postponing life until it's over was always very strange.
Is 'scar-city' a British thing?
I've been told for fifty+ years that its 'scare-city'
here in the states.
I'm British. No it's not a British thing. No-one pronounces it like that, because we are not Americans. ROFL. - It's "Scare-city" and everyone in the UK pronounces it such. Peace and
@@dyotoorion1835you took me back to 2012 with that ROFL
@ Haha! xD
@@dyotoorion1835Ah'm from Texas and we pronounce it "Scare City" here.
The words I have mispronounced in my life are those which I read in books but didn't hear.
These days I go to Google pronounce when I encounter a new word. It's bloody brilliant.
No. It's not an anywhere thing that I'm aware of.
If I live in the Orville universe, having everything I need, I would still love to write, help build homes, fix computer, etc. I will probably have a garden or even a farm and give food away. I'm sure I won't work my ass off, but I would love to live like that. I know this is simple thinking because it's just 'what if-ism.'
Actually in this episode Kelly tells Lysinda, or whatever her name is, that in the Union everyone has their needs met and the only "currency" is just your good reputation. But she also says that everyone has to do at least something, not doing anything and just wasting your life is frowned upon in their society. This is why you have to do something, anything, whether it's art, STEM, Military, anything, even if you aren't good at it.
I would do everything in my power to get to a wild planet and stay there, away from this world.
You wouldn't need to build homes, give food or fix computers, the replicator would do that. So you would write books competing with AI. And the garden you can have it right now. Just saying... :)
Amazonas, costa rica, Alaska, lot of places to choose from in your own planet
@@tomich20 I guess just travel and explore than. Well, someone have to fix those replicators.
never make fun of someone who learnt a word through reading.
There's a word that I butchered until I heard it. I can't remember what it was.
Unless you're teasing them.
that is something that would be valid in the 1800s, not today, you can go to google and find plenty of sites that tell you how to pronounce correctly a word.
In the age of information, ignorance is a choice
@@kolinmartz Nope. Ignorance is still simply not knowing. What did I do last night? Do you know? Is your ignorance of what i did a choice (yes, what I did is publicly available).
even if a matter synth actually existed, the amount of energy required, assuming efficiency of 100%, would be at least 9E13 Joules PER GRAM, i know star trek and the orville are not supposed to be uber realistic, but i hate that this is basically never adressed. the glass of water she made used the energy equivalent of a few hundred kiloton nuclear bomb.
EDIT: this is assuming it is converting energy into matter . the values were calculated through e=mc^2 e=(0.001kg)×(3E8m/s)2, e=0.001×9E16, e=9E13joules per gram.
If you can convert energy to matter, and especially if you can convert energy into whatever specific configuration of matter you want, then you can probably do the opposite as well. A 500g glass of water might represent an enormous amount of energy (4.5E16 J), but you can get that energy by feeding the replicator 500g of anything else you want to get rid of.
Star Trek replicators don't exactly work like that though (otherwise why bother with dilithium when you can power the ship for a month by dumping a handful of dust into the replicator). They're more like extremely high resolution 3D printers. Enough resolution to turn helium into gold, though rearranging whole atoms is more efficient. That still means it can disassemble organic waste into its component elements and then reassemble them into whatever food you ask for.
I always assumed that the Star Wars replicator was just a sophisticated transporter that could transport individual atoms from a storage depot somewhere and precisely assemble them into the desired object. That's why some objects cannot be made by replicators - because the raw atoms are not available. Other objects, such as food, are mostly made from hydrocarbons and water so they can be easily replicated.
Well if energy is basically free it becomes a non issue
@@inteallsviktigt Sure, but no-body ever said there is free, unlimited energy, on the Enterprise or the Orville starships. :-)
@with fusion it effectively is beyond a certain efficiency as it just compounds
Yes! Thank you for pointing out a concept that sometimes even Star Trek itself misunderstands: that replicators and teleporters mean nothing if people and society doesn't mature past the greedy ambition for accumulation. Even in the utopian future of the Federation, replicators weren't around for a lot of time. It was always about a societal shift rather than a technological one.
As for the people "pointing out" your pronunciation, well...
What was that saying about the guy pointing at the star and people only looking at the finger?
True, and while we have persons in thing's like big pharma, agriculture/food industry etc openly putting profit before people getting away with these things, the cycle is continuing.
Perhaps the issue isn't about the upper echelons being in charge though. Maybe it's more about the regular citizens choosing to believe none of them have nefarious tendencies so don't want to promote a society that's not all,not just a few 'bad apples'.
Also, sounds like a reference to the Bruce Lee student in Enter The Dragon...
For billionaires, it would never be enough. Ever larger yachts would be built because each wants to have the biggest one. Even owning more than they could ever use, they still want more for themselves.
That's human nature. Even poor people also want to own more then they could ever use.
@@asandax6 that's factually untrue. not everyone wants to be big, most just want to live out a comfortable existence
@@LineOfThy And your definition of "comfortable" is different to his... So you have no argument there. The guy above is right.
@ What? That's a complete non sequitur.
@ And you are wrong again.
Your definition of "Comfortable" might mean you need MORE or LESS than he does. Which means one of you is going to own more.
It also implies that given everyone is different, some of these people who say "I just want a comfortable lifestyle" will want MORE than they actually need.
Look at people who say being able to go on two vacations abroad is the bare minimum.
Then look at people who say they need a two floors house and a car for each family member to be bare minimum.
The "Comfortable" argument is subjective at best and inconsequential in truth.
The guy above is right. People will want more than they need. EVEN YOU will want more than you need.
You are here trying to talk nonsense in a YT comment which implies you have both free time and internet and spend both on youtube... You don't NEED this for a comfortable life.
Maybe by MY definition of "Comfortable" you shouldn't have internet.
So don't try to spit that bullshit term you just googled "non sequitur" to appear smarter than you are. Were you actually knowing that term (and not google it as I said), you'd also know he was right.
Curb the arrogance.
If I can choose, I would work about 30 hours a week in two types of jobs. One in research, to test my mental skills, and the other in construction, to test the physical aspect. This would be a good way to balance these two aspects and avoid burn out.
By the way, it's crazy how one little mispronunciation detracts the whole comment section from the amazing content you're creating.
I would do the same.
2 days academic research with top minds, then two days on the tools talking about footie and women while chasing walls to install electrical wire. 😅
There is such an electrical energy you feel when you are doing something you want to do, and getting better and better at it!
the only way things would change for the better if we got the matter synthesizer in our world right now, is if at least one were installed in every single household on the planet, with large ones in central locations that everyone can use.
I had the exact same thought! There are some points that worries me though, first would be the matter (pun very much intended) of energy, and I'm not sure every households can handle the strain on their electrical systems - though of course if an adequate power source would go along that point is moot - then close second would be that such a device lands in the hands of violent criminals who hurt people for power and greed and not survival and in the hands of terrorists whod use it to make weapons or bombs - though I suppose a security hardwired into the system would take care of that - then the governments themselves, I fear they'd forcefully remove or outlaw the usage of the devices because the lobbies behind them would force their hands or because dictatorships wouldn't let their citizens enjoy such privileges.
@@Fyr365 oh government would absolutely try to do that. the power source would also be a problem too you're right. such a device almost certainly would take a small fusion generator to power it, or if plugged into an outlet would probably use as much energy as an entire city. converting energy into matter or manipulating molecules into specific structures ((the matter synthisizer does one of those things)) would take immense amounts of energy to do. as far as the criminals go. the playing field is actually far more evened out now. they can get weapons, so can everyone else. they also have much less reason to hurt anyone, at that point its just the psychos and not the gangs really anymore since gangs are financially motivated. the governments would absolutely try to ban them. except for a few. this would cause a mass exodos to those few countries, which would probably start a world war. of course thats in the case of any government actually being able to successfully collect and ban them. which could be made much harder if taken ones get replaced every day ((every household on the planet got one over night. whoever did that can continue their work)). but even without that, citizens would hide them world wide if the governments started trying to take them, there would be a small supply of them in nearly every community and it would still be a failed effort. just like the war on drugs and prohibition were and are both failed efforts. banning something never works.
@@KagaiYami All very true. Sigh... Makes one dream. 😌
We don't need matter synthesizers, we can just use the current technology and logistics to have a delivery service that would bring to you any product you wanted.
Get rid of branding, get rid of competition in the system, get rid of all the layers and inefficiencies. That would create the problem of too much centralized power into a single entity, or maybe we might find a way of having a distributed network system that works towards that goal without centralization. But that seems like an impossible logistical problem, we need new ways of dividing that power and new politics.
But considering we found a way to solve control over the machine.
The only thing required for that would be just energy, that's the real scarce resource.
That's why I don't like the de-growth mentality. You don't get to the post-scarcity through de-growth and slow down, the opposite.
The real problem with our dependency on oil for everything is that its stopping us from finding and using an even more dense and powerful source of energy. Nuclear was supposed to be that. Petrol is 50K BTU per gram. Nuclear is 5M BTU per gram.
I bet to really have post-scarcity we need some power source that's 5T BTU per gram, it must be Nuclear Fusion, but that's being way much hard to get than what we thought. And we didn't even switched away to Nuclear.
We need to go from 20TW to 200PW (that would be the total radiance of Sun on Earth). It can only be done by Solar and Nuclear, forget about everything else and we're centuries from being able to control Fusion.
That's what I don't like about "climate change", they're too much focused on CO2 reduction instead of being focused on making more energy, for a cheap price. Its almost like the purpose of "climate change" is to control the production of CO2 and keep it at "safe boundaries", safe for the powers that be, the ones that have assets in oil.
If there was no restrictions anyway about the generation of power, what would happen is that CO2 use would naturally decrease as we find that Solar power and Nuclear power is really cheaper and better.
We need more energy, not less.
And no, industry doesn't pollute, the more advanced and the more complex and developed it becomes, the less it pollutes. Its sub-developed countries that produce most of the pollution by lack of regulation.
In theory, nothing prevents the industry to be perfectly self-contained and leak no pollution into the environment. People blame industrialization, and they say things like "but the cost". The real cost is energy, if energy is cheap, then cleaning pollution is trivial. But companies are never going to do that because of profits, no, they are not going to do that if their competitors can profit from not doing it, if they are all required to do it, then you just do it, the field is leveled. Considering you don't have a centralized system that has no internal competition, but considering we're not there yet.
The real root of problem are the Malthusians.
Another thing that I think would make people free from being "economical units" would be pricing everything in energy use, actual "Watts". Imagine if I everything I bought would be just the cost in energy that it required for the item to be produced. I bet you it would be very cheap.
The irony when Bitcoin is baked by the price of energy doesn't escape me, it really is the currency of the future.
@ okay, some of that is just wrong, industry not polluting being what im talking about. also never said anything about not needing more energy, we need a lot more. more than you said even. all what you said would do is bring us up to a type 1 civilization. but none of what you said, solves the problem of scarcity which a matter synthesizer would. without developing something like a matter synthesizer humanity is just a plague of locus. consuming endlessly till we consume ourselves out of existence.
There's literally a book on this topic called "Trekenomics" since Star Trek had the replicator.
Something we're all learning these years is that even when certain individuals have everything and more, it's just never enough. We have people on this planet who have money and resources for thousands of lifetimes in total luxury, yet they keep on hoarding and taking away from others no matter the cost. The reason? When you have "everything", all that remains in their head is to increase the gap between you and everyone else further, and if you can't go any higher, all that's left for these people is to push everyone else down into absolute misery.
Even if we invented the matter synthesizer right now and gave one to any person in this world overnight, there would immediately be some people using it to *take it away* from others, until they're the only ones left with one.
It's going to take huge changes in the global power balances to achieve anything like The Orville or Star Trek societies.
It's not that. It's that if you print cars, all car manufacturers go bankrupt and their owners, all their power and thus predictability, stability, survival, etc...
@@rusalkinif you can print cars, the car manufacturers wouldn't *need* money.
It is not about scar-city or having resources, it was always about power. Power is never enough for those who seek it.
That's why I those movies are always a meh for me, I don't like utopias, they cast away this basic part of human nature. Marx was stupid and never understood that, the problem isn't capitalism, the problem is human nature.
Even if all resources were free, even time, power would still be scarce, because you can only have one master.
Maybe we can change that, but then are we human anymore ?
I think that's what separate this society from the next level, but genetic engineering is taboo, even thou we are not religions anymore, we sort of still are, the neoliberal religion don't like "eugenics", as they call it. They want their "cattle", I mean, their population they govern to be equal "economical" units. They say its for economical output, but really its about control.
If people can just change themselves, then no one can control anything anymore.
Dostoyevsky wrote about that in “Notes from Underground.”
As soon as I heard the opening line of this video about Orville I was like "He's going to talk about the episode about the woman from the society ruled by capitalist and social media, and the matter synthesizer. And how managing certain technologies demand certain moral codes to prevent them from ruining society." Bam! I also admit that is probably one of the best episodes that I continue to think about since I saw it. Really great episode.
Well, well, well, looks like I wasn't the only one to watch this show the third time and still be amazed by all the topics this show discussed.
I feel like if we worked for reputation, then we would focus on pleasing others as the main goal, resulting in overworking and hiding your own mental health so that you can continue to work without others getting concerned. You'd be so focused on getting the job done that you forget about yourself.
In Japan, people often take pride in what they do, and therefore there are less profit-over-quality products there... Most of the stuff made there is usually pretty well made. However my Japanese mum sometimes tells me about how working there is very stressful, and results in late nights and apparently once she fell asleep while walking home from work.
I reckon working purely for reputation would be a better system than we have right now, but still have many problems.
Now I need to see this show. I have heard things about it but the episode may turn me to watch it.
This was my fav episode although all of them are excellent. I remember wondering the same things as this girl and realizing that it takes a mental paradigm shift that occurs slowly over time that helps a society take the steps necessary to become a post-scarce world. This conversation they had was a profound one for me too. When you hear TRUTH, you know it.
I became a bitcoiner in 2017 and over the last 4.5 years especially I've learned so much about how we are already taking the steps by replacing our infinate fiat money that has led to all of the ills we currently face in society with a scarce hard money that by virtue of it's scarcity will help bring much more abundance to us all and actually reverse the wealth inequality problem that's dividing us. And even better, it will do this globally simultaneously to everyone around the world but it must be acknowledged, studied and understood by each person in turn and that does take time, so that the necessary paradigm shift can occur within them. We are currently 16 years into the shift and we are all very hopeful for the positive change for humanity that will be brought about because of it. We are trying to teach people as fast as we can to minimize the collateral damage as we go thru this necessary transition because we know what's possible on the other side. Then one day in the future if we make discoveries like the matter synthesizer, we'll be ready to handle it without it tearing us apart as it would today.
I’d like to present a counterpoint to your example with Nestle and water. This is not meant to be confrontational, just another perspective:
Ok, first of all, water is absolutely essential to life, and as such it should be free, or as close to free as we can make it. No argument from me whatsoever. I agree. And pretty much anywhere you go in the developed world, tap water is damn near free. My water bill runs about $50/month, which comes to about $8.94 per 1,000 gallons.
Now that’s *not* free, but the money I pay goes to support the infrastructure, the cost of laying and maintaining the pipes, purifying the water, pumping it, and of course paying the salaries of the people who work for the water utilities, so I think *most* people would agree that’s fair, yes? The expense isn’t for profit, it’s just to ensure the supply continues. Because water is essential to life.
*BOTTLED* water is *NOT* essential for life. It is a luxury. An individual 16.9 oz bottle here runs about 93 cents if I buy a 24-pack at the store, making it, what, about 18 cents per ounce? That’s several THOUSAND times what tap water costs, and, as has been repeatedly shown here in the US, Nestle’s bottled water *IS* just tap water put in plastic bottles at a several-thousand-percent markup.
So *water* is a necessity, *bottled* water is a luxury, and one that only doofuses buy.
If people were dying of dehydration in the developed world and Nestle was controlling the supply, that would be a problem. But they’re not. They’ve just managed to convince millions of suckers that their tap water is better than everyone else’s tap water. There’s an ethical dilemma there, but it’s one I’m willing to overlook as it keeps 48,000 people employed in the US, who would otherwise have to work at some probably-worse job.
Now when we come to the subject of the high price of insulin, or various other drugs, *THERE* I agree with you. Medical companies have a captive audience and can charge whatever they want. It’s price gouging at the expense of people’s lives, and it’s not fair.
Again: Medicine is always gonna cost *SOMETHING.* The development of medications can take years or decades, and that’s extremely expensive, and some medications are always going to require more effort and resources to produce than others. For instance, Insulin doesn’t require a ton of effort to make, and you have economies of scale bringing down the cost more, so it runs about $30/dose in Canada, most of the expense of which is simply the cost of bottling, shipping, and keeping it from going bad. In the US a dose is about $100, which is way the hell too high. The Canadian price is probably appropriate or nearly so, the American price is gouging. OTOH, drugs like Zolgensma required decades to develop, is harder than hell to make, and is useful only in a relatively small number of (very important) cases. So even if we lived in a world where everything is free, Zolgensma is still going to require VASTLY more man-hours to produce Insulin. So the exorbitant cost of that drug - and trust me, brother, it’s crazy expensive - isn’t unjustified.
very well presented point, and you are right... but only *within* capitalism. The entire focus of the argument by the Orville and the video is that, well, to use your example, your water *would* be free. Because without capitalism, there would be no cost to support the infrastructure, laying down the pipes, purifying the water etc.
Of course that's work that needs to be done, and of course there needs to be a system in place to make sure that work is done! But with capitalism, that system is essentially coercion: it's part of the larger system of work and prices that dictate you *must* work, or be deprived of resources, dignity, life even.
Same with medicine: you say things "always gonna cost *SOMETHING*" but again, that's only true under capitalism. A different system, with a different way to make sure that work is done, can absolutely and potentially work without having anything cost anything. In the cases where you have something that is objectively harder to produce, that new system also must figure out a way to distribute that limited resource appropriately, of course.
But it does not *have* to be capitalism, especially when you are dealing with fiction and are free to imagine totally different system. In the case of the Orville, I don't even think it is totally correct to say it is a totally scarcity-free utopia: could I get a capital class super starship with the most powerful possible weapons on it just because I want it? I doubt it. Their system obviously must have guardrails and ensure their top, actually scarce or dangerous technology is controlled. But that system does not have to be capitalism.
Hell, when you consider it like that we are already doing it in some cases: I'm sure Bezos has technically enough money to buy a small, or even not so small, fleet of jet fighters, tanks, bombs and military equipment... but we decided that does not fall under capitalism, and you can't buy it as a private individual or company.
Essential is interesting. How you obtain essential items and services determine the price. Water is essential but how you get it determines the price. Water has always been an interesting topic. In most countries access to water is cheap but because its so cheap so much of this is wasted even accidentally or unknowingly.
@@myky992 I think the main issue I have with your rebuttal is that you seem to be associating cost with a price tag. The price tag is a marker of cost (and even the Soviet Union had money) but the cost is the labor and resources put into the creation of something. Scarcity is an unfortunate fact of the universe, conservation of mass, conservation of energy, second law of thermodynamics, etc. When you spend time to do one thing it costs you the opportunity of having done something else, so opportunity cost exists because life is finite. So there will always be cost.
The real question is allocation. Who gets the things that cost something to make? Capitalism has an answer to this, but can easily go wrong if not well managed. Marxism has another answer, but the feedback mechanism seems a lot weaker to me. It is a fact that people prefer to get more allocation for less cost. The ideal in a market economy (not Capitalism) is that allocation is in proportion to the incurred cost of the individual. In Capitalism the ideal is that allocation is in proportion to the creation of value (value I would say being a reduction in collective cost), and in Marxism anyone gets what they need and only give what they are able. The last one sounds great, until you remember that most everyone prefers to get more allocation for less cost. What happens when 'needs' exceed 'abilities'?
Any economic theory that will work has to answer the cost-allocation question, and has to take into account the deal-seeking selfishness of normal people, and the fact that scarcity is fundamental to the universe. I admit I find explorations such as we see in Orville very interesting for all the same reasons everyone who showed up here probably does. However, I also recognize it is a fiction. The idea that reputation is the compensation for work does nothing to solve the allocation problem. And if reputation is the basis of allocation we have something that easily starts looking like corruption. But, it is interesting to consider the moral lesson of a hypothetical society where everyone is basically a volunteer charity worker.
@@myky992 So the man hours to make it are free? The man hours to ship it are free? The fuel used to ship it is free? You're argue that cost is exclusive to capitalism is false on the face of it.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint... Everything you've said works on the FALSE premise that you NEEDING something also means you DESERVE it inherently.
And that "deserve" also implies someone has to provide it to you for free with no effort on your end.
So your whole argument / point crumbles under logical questioning.
I'm not onboard with the Orville's idea of "reputation" as currency. Reputation is more easily counterfeited than money. Social Media proves this consistently.
Good video though. I've been a little skeptical of the the whole post-scarcity idea, but I think you addressed the idea appropriately.
Star Trek: First Contact (movie) had a scene that made a similar point about society moving away from the need for money and being able to find actual fulfillment.
OMG, what a fascinating blend of cool info and jaw dropping naïveté about how goods and services are actually created! I am a left leaning socialist oriented futurist, but to neglect to see the actual prosperity enabled by capitalism is genuinely unfortunate.
I'd never heard of this series before. Can't wait to watch it! Just put it on hold at my local public library. Thank you!
Oh no I can’t with scar city 😂
Why does he pronounce it like that?
Hes probably not a native speaker and hasn't engrained it in his head how its really pronounced
Yeah he said he's from Denmark
I know what went orrey (awry). Behind the fahcod (façade) of the set lies an AI voice. I was entertained. Hopefully you are too.
"If there's a cure, the death count should be 0."
-some guy on the internet
Don't agree completly, but he has a point.
You can't "cure" old age, because who would want to live for 500 years, with no cognitive functions anymore. Additionally, there will always be accidents.
@zeriousvolt1245 yeah, that's why I don't completely agree. But what do you mean by "old age"?
@@zeriousvolt1245dude, that guy probably meant cure for diseases like tuberculosis or malaria. Old age isn't a disease
Shows like the Orville focus on the cream of society and the creme that *wants* to fit in to the societal model. There will always be people who would rather drop out than fit in. Of course, if there were no needs, it would be fine, but the focus of shows like this are always on the exceptional individuals, not the ordinary, or those who rebel.
I would love to see a show like this that includes "views" of all of the rest.
IF it included opposing views or AT LEAST some common sense, the show couldn't exist anymore. Enjoy it for the fiction it is.
rebel? for what exactly? what their world don't have that makes them rebel?i don't understand your logic here
@@AdeTri-pu7qi People can rebel over anything. Recognition, ego, reputation, partnership, etc. You seem to limit your thinking very much with that question.
You assume people rebel only for certain reasons you personally deem fit instead of accepting reality, people can rebel over ANYTHING they think is unfair (EVEN if it isn't).
@ you can't just say "people rebel for anything" without giving any example, in their world everyone can do anything they want not because they need, you made up the concept of unfairness for that situation and make everything unusually complicated.
@@Kira110lol It's true, and cultivating grievance over total non-issues is part of the dictator's playbook (never mind that we're looting you, just look at those transgender immigrants over there!). Good education helps with this.
I remember halfway through the first season of Orville figuring out that 'humanity in a post-scarcity existence' was the theme and nobody agreed with me.....
While the mispronunciation if scarcity is a bit distracting, you shouldn't let that detract from the video. Your doing some really great work, and should keep it up.
Your "Your" is also distracting. It should be "You're".
@cinbad777 miner spelling mistake
@@user-ip9fp8ug5y I know it was a minor spelling mistake. I was actually just joking. The irony!
The Orville was an amazing show with fantastic writing that looked at so many issues affecting us today without being "preachy" about it. I'm a HUGE fan. So glad you took the time to make this video. New subscriber here.
saying bottled water is artificially made scarce is just not honest, its transformed, its purified, its put into a bottle and transported to locations more convenient to you than the aquifer or stream they came from, labor and capital are used to make the natural state of that water into something way more convenient for you, this transformation is scarce as all that could have been used for the water could be used for something else, but there was enough demand for the water to justify it
And tap water is significantly cheaper, partially subsidized by the government and thus partially paid for with our tax money, and is piped to us directly. I would argue that tap water is far more convenient and the only thing necessary to make it hand transportable is to buy a reusable bottle and wash it out every other day or so. People are lazy and stupid and have no clue how the world around them works, which is why we keep getting so many armchair quarterbacks decrying that capitalism is evil while we haven't even truly had it for many decades, if not at least a century. All of the social programs which could have been done better by private individuals have eroded our previously capitalistic economy. Now it's some unholy degradation, a ghost of its former self. It's been demonstrated that if the money paid into social security were instead invested in the private sector that a person could earn significantly more money and could even retire with it.
"its transformed" into what? Its still water.
"its purified" so is tap water ans in some country the restrictions on tap water are stricter than on botteled water.
"more convenient for you" more convenient than your Tap?
Everything you say also is true for tap water. Yet tap water is significantly cheaper than botteled water. So yes, botteled water is kinda somewhat a scam.
@@Fluxikator no one is forcing you to buy bottled water. You can drink cheap tap water or free rainwater. Bottled water is a service for people who choose to pay for it.
@@FluxikatorThis. In my country we do have tap water of better quality than the standards for bottled water.
@18:09 if they run the idea of having Lysella be a re-occurring character then they will be taking inspiration from an idea in ST Voyager.
With ratings problems in Season 3 it was suggested that the show could use an idea seen in ST IV The Voyage Home. The idea is that of an audience surrogate. In the 1996 two-part episode "Future's End" the viewers are introduced 20th century astronomer Rain Robinson (played by Sarah Silverman).
The audience surrogate in ST IV is 20th century cetologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (played by Catherine Hicks).
It was considered that Silverman's character was to join the crew in that episode and return to the 24th century at the end.
In the end stated that Brannon Braga, Voyager's co-executive producer, abandoned the idea and instead chose Jeri Ryan to join the crew in season 4 of the show.
"Water is abundant and essential so it should be free." That's not how it works though. Water is everywhere, yes, but water that is clean and pure enough to drink is absolutely _not_ everywhere. Even if we eliminated all pollution, water generally needs to be treated before it's safe to drink, and in many parts of the world water is quite scarce. _Someone_ has to build and maintain the infrastructure to gather, purify, and distribute that water, and those people should be compensated for their effort. Even if it's considered a public good and paid for with taxes, it's still not free.
Bottled water is a different thing. In most cases bottled water is an unnecessary product, yes. But in some cases it actually does provide a use. Many places have tap water that is unsafe to drink. Places where infrastructure has been destroyed need bottled water. Actually creating and distributing that water takes effort, energy, and time.
Plus, there are plenty of contexts where drinking water exclusively from tap would be unwieldy or unsanitary.
Imagine being on the subway in a huge city like NY and being thirsty. Your only reasonable source of drinkable water is going to public toilets and drink from the sink.
You’d need a very higienic society that respects public property (not modern US for what I see), a very involved cleaning setup (also costly), and constant vigilance over a huge area for biochemical attacks for this to not go horribly wrong eventually.
I swear, sometimes people complain about stuff without thinking about two seconds about the feasibility or repercussions of the alternatives.
HE is a German and they ALWAYS had a strong leftist streak, just like NOW, when the totally destroyed their economy with the MAD green agenda and blaming the results on US.
Seek: Frankfurt School all of the crazy leftists making a plan how to destroy capitalism on the West.
Well, can not say their descendants are not successful.....
German industry, meanwhile is relocating to the US, because they are being destroyed by unreliable and extremely expensive electricity and outrageous taxes.
Lastly, dear LAZY Germans, THIRTY HOUR workweek is NOT enough today in this world.
But what causes tge water to be dirty besides the obvious, it's the money they take money out of the water budget for other things THEY find important and Mexico is a great example just search up Mexico clean water you'll see they choose not to maintain the necessary infrastructure
Travel. Not just as a relaxing vacation, but to talk to people, see how others live and to document what I've learned.
The truth that can never be spoken is that we are multiple subsets of a single species. One of these subsets desire to impose their will on others and we call that imposition power.
When you talk about everyone sitting around on our phones all day, you deny the very nature brought humanity into existence. Humans, in general, are not long satisfied doing nothing for extended periods of time, yet very few of us seem to consider that very few of us are like we are, personally. You like making videos and I would guess that is because you are a creative person, an artist. Artists invariably make their art when left to their own devices because that is what satisfies that drive. Some of us are very physically oriented and given the choice would spend most of their time doing physical things. Others are problem solvers, or teachers, or parents, and so on. Long ago these drives were known as "our calling".
The argument that society must operate as it does was invented by the power seekers to convince us, or perhaps themselves that they are right, thus justifying their actions in forcing others to do that which they would never choose to do.
This discussion is way too big for UA-cam comments or even hundreds of videos, but it is absolutely vital to everyone, and our future depends on having it.
"One of these subsets desire to impose their will on others and we call that imposition power."
There are many subsets that wish to impose their will on others. Who are the people you call "power-seekers" but people you want to bend to your will to pay for your wish list?
@@PvblivsAelivs I don't understand your question. Are you asking me to define this trait? Are you asking if I want to make someone else pay for my wish list? Maybe I just completely missed your point..
The subject is very relevant to me, since I tried to find a job that I would not have only to pay my groceries but also give me a vital sense of purpuse. Its too bad to me that many managers become unhappy very soon, as it seemed logical to me that this job was somewhat well paid, but don't give you, for many people, a full sense of purpuse other than to enforce company stuff and rules on people. What you said is very true about technology in general, without education and in general as well, the more you advance, the more you take the risk to create dangerous things (internet i.e.).
"I can do a job I like?"
"Yep."
"Wow. Okay, I wanna be a starship captain."
"Uh, okay... are you qualified?"
"Actually yes, I passed all the courses."
"Oh. Um, well, there's only three postings available and over ten thousand applicants."
"Yeah but I REALLY REALLY want to be a starship captain."
"But there's over-"
"Hey you said there's no scarcity!"
Make your own ship and go exploring. No scarcity
@ Hmmm technically possible if replicators are that available. And now we have zillions of people making starships and captaining them, and also pulling their hair out trying to get enough crew members. "No I'm the captain, you're the navigator." "No I wanna be captain, YOU can be the navigator!" "NO NO NO I'M THE CAPTAIN GODDAMMIT"
Not everyone is allowed to make a starship, in case somebody uses one to fly to a less culturally advanced planet and hand out matter-replicators.
@@perfectionbox so what we do for cars?? Have a license program and insurance??? It’s the same when you go on a road trip, the driver(worker), the front seat navigator and social director, back seat snack dispensers and all around good time. We have worked this out in the past??? Do you not have friends?
@@perfectionbox it’s so ingrained in the past we have a term “shot gun” to sit in the passenger seat from the days of carriages.
You need to use the replicator smartly when you land on the planet. Somehow replicate enough replicators that supply and demand are equal, or otherwise hide the technology except for select secretive instances. Or replicate enough gold and currency that once the governments catch on, money will be worthless if they admit to it. But there will be a precious window where if you focus on the lower and middle class, you could... ugh Im just thinking out loud. I really feel lost trying to get this to work.
The problem with this episode is that it upholds the untrue idea that uplifting is a bad idea. It's capitalist realism and a bandaid for the Fermi paradox
If you are post-plantary and post-scarcity and find intelligent life it is your obligation to give them the opportunity to learn from you and join the galactic community. It wouldn't take more than a few months maybe years at most to acclimate.
To say otherwise like this episode or in star trek with the "prime directive" is just cope.
Even if that was the policy you wouldn't be able to stop groups who want to help, and in post-plantary post-scarcity it only takes that one group.
Just educate the population and let those who don't want to join be left alone (but let any descendents of them who want to join the galactic community be allowed to)
I think you have a point. The problem presented in this video happens when the government of the native population is given the replicators which inevitably results in catastrophe due to the corrupt politicians and elites wanting to remain in power by hoarding the replicators and using them personal gain and political dominance. But if what they did is send a message to everyone offering the natives to become citizens of the Federation instead, they won't have to worry about the corrupt politicians and elites who would then lose all their power. However, I admit that some of the corrupt politicians and elites would act like Humpty Dumpty and prevent the people from leaving their government so some people would get injured and die at first. But ultimately, this is the best path with the least bloodshed.
Has human history given any successful examples of this? Even benevolent attempts to make contact as you suggest still have problems. No government would allow this to occur, to their people which would then mean that the UFP or Planetary Union would have to take over that government in the process and thus be imperialists. People once thought that the distributed internet would be a force for good in a similar fashion. How'd that work out?
It would take several generations to rid a civilization of destructive profit and status seeking behaviour. However, the rich and powerful members of a capitalist society dictate the cultural norms, and they often make self-biased assumptions about the rest of their species ("It's a dog eat dog world, everybody wants what I have") which turn out to be false. Working class and middle class people often don't have any greed or motivation to rise above everyone else. Greed, afrer all, is a disease, a special condition, not the basic instinct like self preservation.
@ I don't think you understand the situation. There is no possibility of resistance. Even a single ship could show up and over power the combined might of the planet. The governments would have absolutely no say in the matter, read my other comment for some examples.
All they would have to do would be to come by and make their presence known, which wouldn't be hard, they could hack into the internet, news stations, etc, or drop a few ambasitor robots down that can speak every language or fly low enough in the sky to be seen accross different regions of large populations or a combination of those or something else entirely. Then they would explain who they are and what their technology is and help us quickly become post planetary ourselves, by teaching us how to do it and working together with us in the process and leaving anyone alone who does not wish to join while easily disabling any threats or government structures that would impede the process out of self serving reasons. It would be entirely voluntary who wanted to join or not, and everyone would have the opportunity without anyone being able to stop those who want to or force those who do not.
Give humanity a few months/years to get used to their presence (we adapt very quickly to new status quo I don't think it would take more than even a week or two, maybe a month for humanity to acclimate to the unambiguous presence of intelligent alien life offering us help and a place in the galactic community, even communities in the global south would acclimate)
*TL;DR they would give us the ability to stop destroying ourselves and come together and join the galactic community, with those who want to be left alone for whatever reasons the space to do so with the opportunity to change their mind or for future generations to either stay or leave, in order to maintain cultural relevance and history.*
The condescending arrogance of "it happened to this planet, so we are certain it will happen to everyone else" stinks of crypto capitalism. We all dream to live in that universe yet assume we would be part of the federation. Imagine Q grants you your wish and you wake up on that planet, knowing the neighboring star system lives in paradise.
If a person were to come up with the idea of something akin to a matter synthesizer, they would be disappeared by their government and their schematics seized or destroyed.
that's right many many inventors are gone because of inventing free energy engines and other things that i can't mention
The one point you made I disagree with most would be the idea that land could be redistributed. I believe any government that would seize control of land wouldn't have the best interest of the people in mind.
You mean those few big land owners interest?
Yes, like China.
@@AlanBrando-s4x no as in every day people struggling to pay mortgages interest.
What? You mean you're 5 acres of apportioned barren desert wasteland isn't to your liking?
@delrunplays2903 my standard lot that I'm paying mortgage on is to my liking.
Two questions:
-what if the matter synthesizer was introduced as open source. In a simple enough design and instruction that anyone with a basic tool know how could make it. Would this prevent it from being hoarded by the elites?
- Would having this technology really change human nature to form factions and create conflict? You'd think resource scarcity is the root of all conflict but I'm willing to bet people would still find stuff to fight about.
The idea that scarcity is the root of all conflict as opposed to human nature is an idea made up by leftists.
Would make conflicts less likely to happen. Its speculated the first wars were fought over fertile land due to the introduction of agriculture. Battles happen yeah but no wars due to population
@@jdurrant5633 The only true ways to prevent wars would be to permanently disable certain aspects of human nature through either druglike means or genetic personality engineering, and I'm not sure which sounds more like a dystopian film.
Your points and analysis are spot on. I absolutely love The Orville in no small part because they are not afraid of tackling the little questions. Buckminster Fuller proclaimed years ago that there was no need for everyone to have a job. The book "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graber is an excellent ancillary source of supporting material. I would also suggest (having not looked at the other videos on your channel this may sound stupid. I'm not but I do have a bit of the lazy.) you binge the entirety of the television show "The Good Place" a couple of times. The Universe don't care where you get your philosophy.
If replicators would be introduced tomorrow everybody would synthesize so much stuff that
we would run out of landfills .
The landfills where said replicators get the matter from needed to do the
synthesis .
Which would basically be a re-arrangement of pre-existing atoms into new molecules
and re-arrangement of said molecules into new stuff.
So the stuff from landfills would be the new scarcity.
Billionaires would own whole landfills, poor people only own their own garbage
that then can be re-arranged again and again.
A book becomes a MP3 player, then a cellphone, then a bicycle and so on.
Sounds like perfect minimalism: you own 1000kg of stuff which you can
resynthesize again and again.
If everybody wants something made of iron, at the same time, and the stuff
repositories run out of iron: replicator replies with "sorry no bicycle today,
want something not made of iron?"
Iron is the stable end point of fusion and fission, it will never run out
An interesting thing is that people talked about 3D printers in the same way, before most people could buy one. Of course it's a difference between a 3D printer and a replicator, but even if some one like Elon decide to hold on to this technology, it will be hard to keep it for them self's. And when the hacker community have built on, they can build more and more. Also when the world leaders know that they need to find a way to tackle the climate, and they can do it by deny foreign countries the income from export, it's a temptation to not produce one to every one. I don't think people will die because people build weapons, but because people don't need to leave the home and meet a partner. A person will not need any one else, to meet their needs.
It's a great show. There was also an early Star Trek Next Generation show dealing with a man from our century.
This video gave me so much food for thought. Countless people who discovered new medicine did not think of becoming Jeff bezoes of their time. Instead they want to make it affordable.
Yet today our new techs were heavily invested by billionaires and corporations, and the only thing they care about is profit. The days of new inventions for everyone is probably long gone.
the point that kelly makes in the episode reminds me of a show called "my 600 pound life" where the doctor that performs the gastric bypass insists that the patients first drop 100 lb on their own; explaining that getting the surgery will only make matters worse if you don't first address the underlying issues. same for that world that wiped itself out!
Accept spaying first, we don't need these genetics, people are too stupid to regulate themselves
but potable water isn't common or easily available to everybody. Its naturally scarce.
15:59 That's what these shows always get wrong, they assume some great change in humanity will happen, but this is the real fantasy. We haven't significantly changed in 10,000 years. What is two hundred? This is actually something Orville did a good job of showing, they're just as petty, vengeful, and as self-destructive as we are today.
how?
@jingthethief how is water natural scarce? It isn't evenly disturbed, most water isn't drinkable, it has many uses from drinking, to bathing, to laundry, to agriculture, to industry. Even theorically drinkable water is often rendered unsafe by animal waste. Not everybody who needs water lives near a drinkable spring or stream. Other sources of water, like wells, require a lot of labor and are finite.
We haven't changed? Very, very weird assertion to make.
@paulgibbon5991 it's not, it's objectively true.
@@s0ulwindNo, we have definitely changed. Look at the society before us and look at us now. Of course we aren't the best, but we are far better than we were in the past.
Damn! Now I am going to have to buy the series!
Star Trek also has matter replication
I think we don't even have to imagine what if we had such a device. The the OpenSource world is probably the closest thing to a post-scarcity world we have seen. There's a giant world of people working and sharing their work for free. It's a world where you can have anything you want at no cost, take it, make it your own, modify it and share it back. I don't think we're anywhere near ready outside the digital world, but seeing it makes you hopeful that we can have a future like that if scarcity becomes a thing of the past.
I once read the published notebooks of Buckminster Fuller, from about 1930. He said that the technology of the day could provide everyone in the world with all the necessities of life -- energy, food, housing, etc. All we needed was a world government capable of managing it. Unfortunately we never got such a government.
The Orville is such a GEM!!
Man I’m grateful the algorithm led me to you! Excellent video. Subscribed.
Fascinating video! Here are my thoughts:
1: It's true that capitalist businesses are incentivized to maximize profit - this is axiomatic. But this profit incentive pushes capitalist businesses in a free market to create abundance, not scarcity (as you claim). Just think about it: if you can make money by selling a product, then the more products you sell the more money you make. So why wouldn't you sell as much as possible?
The answer to this question is that there is an alternative profit maximizing strategy that's even better than creating abundance - creating a monopoly. A monopoly business will make more profit than a business operating in a free market by creating artificial scarcity and increasing prices. But this monopoly business strategy has a fatal flaw: in a free market someone will start competing against you and take away your excess profits.
The solution to this problem (from the business point of view) is to get the government involved. Only a government has the power to prevent competitors from entering your market. So in the long term, monopolies and artificial scarcity can only exist while government keeps a choke-hold on free markets. Remove the government and you'll still have scarcity, but at the "natural" levels.
Free market capitalism creates abundance, not scarcity. And this isn't just in theory. Real world data clearly shows that the countries with the highest standards of living also have the strongest property rights and the most free markets. Like democracy, capitalism isn't perfect but it's still better than everything else we've tried.
2. There's no reason to think that synthesizers would end capitalism and destroy the economy. Capitalism has survived many disruptive technologies in the past and only come out stronger. All that synthesizers would do is make most material goods much cheaper (but still not completely free since some raw materials and energy would still be needed). Many technologies have done this in the past without killing capitalism.
But that still leaves the entire service economy for capitalism to operate within. For example, if I want a doctors appointment the synthesizer can't make that for me. I still have to go see an actual doctor and pay them for their work.
3. While the synthesizer is fantasy, we're on the cusp of a real technology that will be almost as good. Think about what the synthesizer does: it creates anything you want out of raw atoms and energy. We could achieve exactly the same result if we had AI's controlling robot factories. Just like we tell the synthesizer what we want and it creates it for us, an AI controlling a robot factory could do the same thing. Sure it wouldn't have cool sound effects and it would be slower, but the outcome would be the same - ask the machine for almost anything and it gives it to you.
These discussions are not just theoretical. Soon we will be seeing the results of a synthesizer-like technology play out in the real world.
sorry but no. read the jungle by upton sinclair to learn why there are food safety standards.
Well firstly, monopolies strive to destroy free markets by whatever means necessary, either by direct physical violence (without government regulation not being available) or regulatory capturing (with government regulation being available).
Then, why would the doctor need to be paid money? What would they do with it, considering that all goods are free? Besides, many people become doctors because they want to help people, not because they want to make money.
Also, who do you think makes the government? Originally the government was organized by local landowning nobles who wanted someone to mediate between them. Isn't it always the ones who demand more free markets, who demand tougher and stronger police states and oppose the state only when it harms the profit rates (as in, modern European or east-Asian welfare state for example)?
Problem with that approach however, is that such radical libertarianism often falls prey to outside influence. Additionally Monopolies are not only enforced by patent rights and such (honestly with some technologies absolutely the case), they can also be enforced by the industries themselves. See gilded age USA for further information on how that can escalate for certain technologies.
The existence of Government can thus due to external influence not be discarded. Someone needs to run the military and police force at the very least. Anarchocapitalism would only end up creating a military force to fill the vacuum, or invite foreign powers. Once government exists, it can be used. And it will always be the wealthy who use and abuse Government, because power begets power, with the only countermeasure being some other deciding factor than pure power, which is the reason why democracy works. Because public approval all of a sudden actually matters for those in power.
Keep in mind, that if you do not have government control over the economy, public approval all of a sudden doesn't matter for that huge source of power in society, leading to the predatory economy seen, again, in gilded age America.
This is then my argument why capitalism doesn't inherently create Abundance for the average Individual:
-Capitalist Businesses desire Profit
-Capitalist Businesses corner market
-Eventually some Market limit is reached. Only so much food can be consumed.
-Expansion impossible, thus prices are raised and worker salaries reduced to increase profits, and businesses in the same market are attacked.
-Without sufficient Oversight, these Opponents are removed (dependent on Oversight this ranges from basically warlords taking over opposition territory to hostile takeovers to quiet understandings; patent tricks etc.), based on the fact that power begets power.
-Now the majority of the actual population has no alternatives to the big corporations for either price or work, resulting in low pay and high prices.
Now some people would say 'Thus communism!' but that doesn't seem to work either. I believe a strong democratic state with complete control over infrastructure would be best; Those industries where benefits to society outweigh potential should not be part of capitalism. Also patent laws should be less restrictive than the current US for certain (fk those people gaming the system to get like 70 year patents, that should NOT be allowed). I would also like to see how large worker cooperatives work out, but there are not all too many examples of that yet.
They create abundance, but only in a negative way. Businesses make things that break, things that need to update, things that make you pay them more. Every business that has tried to make unbreakable things went bankrupt. Nokia is a good example, while it still exists, it’s no longer making unbreakable products (speaking from the experience of a Nokia user, their phones are the worst now).
True abundance would be that nothing breaks, nothing needs to be replaced 5 years later. Which isn’t a thing, thus entre manufactured scarcity (as in, you need to buy new things because the old things don’t last long).
@makhnothecossack4948 Direct physical violence isn't a good idea for a company's public image. Plus the competition can also use direct physical violence which will be counter productive and more costly then just competing by reducing price. Monopolies cannot exist without a governing entity preventing competition. Also a government is a monopoly since there's no other entity competing against it.
Why havent we set ai to the task of solving affordable efficient fusion energy . Clean energy for all.
There's a story going round that over a hundred years ago, Tesla came up with the idea of free energy. JP Morgan and friends then shut it down saying: "if you can't put a meter on it, we don't want it (because we can't profit from it)".
Over 100 years later, nothing's changed. Scarcity still rules.
That's because an executive order can't repeal the laws of thermodynamics.
There's a chance you use that technology today in your mobile phone, or if you shop.
There is a misunderstanding of what was meant by "free energy". It isn't free production of of energy, it's about the method of transmission. Instead of using wires to send energy, the air is flooded with electrical energy, that can then be captured using a simple coil of wire. So the energy is free in the sense that it is free from the wires. It is also free because you can't tell who is using that power, so you can't charge for it.
If you are using a wireless charger on your phone, that is what you are doing. The charging station produces a very small energy field, and you have a small coil in your phone that picks up that charge. But the field extends less than an inch. When you go shopping and you see those security tags, they are the same system. A small low level field is set up around the exit and powers a small transmitter in the tag.
But there are a vast number of problems with this. It is incredibly inefficient, most of the power simply bleeds away. And that inefficiency goes up exponentially with the size of the field. So, to send 1kwh 50 miles would take more energy than is produced in the sun. It also still requires resources to produce the power, but had no way of charging for it, so any energy company using this would instantly go out of business, because it would be running at 100% loss.
Free is never free.
@markbrown2206 it would of been a lot quicker to simply comment "I dont understand"
This excellent video made me subscribe to your channel. I always dreamed about to live in Star trek future, where the value of human is defined by his actions not money he have.
Eat the rich with BBQ sauce or Hotsauce?
hollandaise ?
It's gonna go well with every sauce cuz the true rich aren't human. I heard human meat tastes horrible.
Considering Man is a lean sweet meat similar to Pig, id go with bbq sauce.
Barbecue if they’re domestic hot sauce if they’re foreigners😂
@vascofernandes295 that’s a weird thing that you’ve “heard about.”
thanks for highlighting this show. nice to hear that something interesting got made. the non-intervention policy is silly, though; because capitalism is constantly disrupting and immiserating society with new innovations. It's like the daft trots who say Soviet Russian expansion westward at the end of WW2 was bad because it 'wasn't the self-liberation of the working class'. a nation or planet having that tech introduced by a outside communist force would have a much bigger chance of faring well than if it were introduced by a monopoly capitalist. Obviously a extent of timing and development is required - it's harder to introduce the most developed tech to the least developed places.
3:40 bottled water is so stupid. I have my own filter and my own bottles. When you pay for water to your water company you're really just paying for the service, not for the water.
Well you do pay for the water but in the amounts you drink it comes to mere pennies. I bought Hydroflasks for the wife and I a few years ago and we just fill them with ice and water all the time. Even at $50 each they’ve paid for themselves at least a couple times over vs buying flats of water at Costco. Never mind spending $1 or more per bottle at a gas station or something.
Marcus im so glad i found this video since orville is one of my all time favorite shows and this episode in specific was probably my favorite.
I even thought of a follow up episode regarding the character Lysella. The episode would touch on her trying to integrate into society on the orville but find it rather hard since she is from a planet which is basically in the 21st century of its evolution. Meaning she would have 21st century views and every time she would say something the rest of the crew would find it weird or unsettling. Much like how the Moclans have that ritual where they get rid of females. This would alienate Lysella and she would feel lonely maybe even depressed. On top of this she would have a hard time finding a job on the orville that isnt practically being a janitor because she would not have the expertise, education or even augmentations like the other crew members have. Some might even see her as a pet.
I think this would touch on a lot of interesting subjects about time travel and society in general. like for instance how people wish they could go into cryo sleep and wake up 1000 years later, be careful what you wish for since you might find yourself in an alien world where you just wouldnt fit in. It would be like taking a guy from the 18's and putting him in todays society, he would probably lose his mind.
the overfed mice heaven experiment is an interesting cautionary tale
John C Calhoun's rat universe studies.
The only limit was living space and they went extinct.
@@macmcleod1188 yuppatidooo
@@macmcleod1188 even the living space was effectively infinite
they just decided to not use ~90% of it and instead fought over places in the center
@@baronbrummbar8691 Lets say humans live for 80 years, what if we had a living space that didnt get repetitive after exploring it for more than half an hour? Its not just our Biological needs that matter, as has been addressed in the movie too.
what i mean is, the living space was rather limited (in scale, based on Rats physical size) that ended up causing an issue for the rats.
CalHoun'ss rat experiment also expected to see similar cases in Real life scenario on humans too, which, Often outright Contradicted the expected behaviour. People behaved in the opposite of behavioral sink theory.
@@time-for-ecopaydar2858 no you doen´t understand what happend
vast amounts of the living space was untouched all of the mice
...
in the beginning the kmice spread then they stopped to spread and fought over areas even if they had more then enough place to spread
and the mice also wheren´t exploring
...
and that is what the interesting part was
why fight for something that is highly contested when ther is alot of space somewhere else
and the amount of food is also greater somewhere else
9:14 Yes 100% agree. A great example in fiction of a vital technology being made exclusive/ scarce, are the AutoDocs in the film Elysium. A machine that can cure any disease, infirmity, and make you basically immortal. Being exclusively for the richest while the vast majority of humanity dies of preventable causes. The tech is great but its utilization and restriction by a society that favors personal wealth and achievement over the betterment of all ppl, renders its greatness ineffective.
the only way the synthesizer would be able to take hold is if it could be hidden in your pocket, was self powered, able to make a copy of itself and the parts for a larger version, and came with a massive catalogue of items it could make.
a star trek style transporter though? just one of those in the right hands could change the world.
I ain’t getting in a fucking transporter but it’ll be nice to get amazon 3 second delivery
It can probably make itself
I actually love the whole "reputation is what makes you rich" because it wasn't possible before but now, yes, we can make a record that's more or less public and represents us and in fact, this is what we do with the internet anyways, though it's not always a great thing. But much like before larger society we have been operating like that.
Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we can never satisfy the greed of the rich
Yet capitalism, the "greedy" ideology has basically eliminated poverty in every country it has been implemented.
true, but also poverty is from the ignorance of the poor. Poverty is a state of mind as much as anything. The poorest can either live as if their rich with the right mental attitudes or let their poor mental attitude keep them in their state of poverty. We see this changing all the time.
You explained post-scarcity so well that the mispronounciation didn't matter. I'm subscribing.
Pronouncing scarcity wrong is one thing, but ignoring that this was the point of Star Trek is unforgivable😂. Further, we will never escape resource allocation discrepancies because even in a society with nearly no material scarcity - social scarcity will step in. In fact, in the society of the Orville they still have to work hard to compete for technical accolades in order to get the job they want (aka the life they want). In the end, some people will always be born more able to attain the scarce things and that ability will snowball. We already see this with influencer "value" on social media.
FINALLY someone who understands that currency is still currency no matter if it's money, materials, time or reputation or such AND that competence matters in attaining the said currency.... THANK YOU....
Most other weirdos here work on the false premise that resources/currencies existing also means they own it without taking it... Or deserve as much as the ones working hard to get more.
Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom does a really cool job of expanding on this social (or rather, creativity+purpose) scarcity in a post-material-scarcity world. It's also a murder mystery at a time when you can't die because consciousness backups are a thing...
@Kira110lol It is because our education system has been deluded by a Marxist takeover. The most reflexive heuristic in Marxism is "historical materialism" and so much of what passes for intelligent thought these days is simply applying that heuristic to some given subject matter. It is a tedious and often brain dead excersise. The point of Marxism isn't to educate but to awaken the critical consciousness and make revolutionaries. Which means society must suffer brain dead take after toxoplasmotic take as the little ideologues the system cranks out run around doing thier one trick.
@@Kira110lol Not what anyone's saying, but you keep right on declaring victory against the evil strawmen. I'm sure the billionaires will reward you for your devotion, any day now.
@ Your stupid comment proves mine was not a strawman.
Your comment is a pathetic attempt to insult me AGAIN working on the premise that people who have it better than you are EVIL ... With no logical argument... It's an argument built on your personal envy... Because you assume them having more than you means it is unfair to you.
Thanks for proving me right again 😂
As a permanently disabled person I dream of this. If an alien ship took me and said you can never go back to your world. I would say peace out. Humans are cavemen. We are all about greed and corruption. We are selfish and we only care about now. Not the future. I grew up watching Star Trek and hoping humans would strive to get to that point. But now we have a cult in the USA and we have wars constantly. We could feed everyone but it isn't profitable. We could house and educate everyone but it isn't profitable. We are going to destroy our society and we will either end up like Star Trek in another 1,000 years or we will wipe humans off this planet. I don't see humans evolving to a type one civilization anytime soon. I mean just look at the USA and its Oligarchy. We are about to be in a depression and food shortage. Not because we are desperate and can make food but because it will not be picked and it will rot on the ground. We are about to destroy ourselves in the USA. Maybe Canada or China will take over and save us. Because Trump isn't going to help us at all.
I am confident that the way you present yourself is not accurate, you present as someone who wants to do nothing but suck the resources from others and never contribute anything yourself. Others of us cannot live like that. We must do something, for me, I want to create nifty things. Creativity is needed to keep me sane. The nature of people will never change, we are all evil, will always be that way, Star Trek and the like denies that, they are wrong. We need a system that allows evil people to get along, no system has been as successful as capitalism at doing that. There is no substitute for merit based rewards. Just look at all the persons who were not disabled yet have disabled themselves with recreational drugs.
The 40 hour workweek came in around 1940, not 1925 - so we got that form of abundance. And most work isn't hard physical labor any more.
And food costs about half as much as it used to, as percent of disposable income.
And there's a bunch of free stuff that people don't take advantage of because they prefer paying for convenience - like paying for internet and pricey cell data plans instead of getting a cheap service and using free wifi to download stuff to read or watch later.
And a $150 smartphone will do all the essential stuff and most of the 'fun' stuff of a $1000 phone.
I don't think we have artificial scarcity - it's just that people tend to spend most of what they earn, and demand more than they used to be able to get.
We definitely have some artificial scarcity in some markets. OPEC can increase production and drive down prices of oil worldwide when they want to(As they did in 2020 while we were in shutdown in an attempt to crush our oil companies, which worked pretty well), or they can slow down production which lowers the amount available and drives prices of oil up, so can our own oil barons. In Canada, the maple syrup industry is controlled by a cartel, who can do the same type of thing oil companies can to control prices. In the US's housing market, wallstreet companies have bought up homes and apartment complexes they just sit on, refusing to put them on the market for sale or rent, to create artificial scarcity, so they can increase the rents of the units they do offer to the public, which shockingly and nonsensically, makes them more profit than renting all their units at a more affordable rate.
Advertisement is propaganda meant to make you think that you have a lack that you need to fulfill by buying trash
and it works. if it didn't, corporations would put millions and millions into it. Welcome to consumerism.
that's why everyone hates it. Ads make you feel worse.
@tomcraver9659 I see everyone around me purchasing via credit, which inherently hands a good portion to the bank on a monthly basis also.
@@roofdogblues7400 I don't think those are the sort of systemic artificial scarcity that is being considered here?
My impression is that the overall complaint is that the capitalist system 'forces' everyone to work just as hard as always, rather than being allowed to benefit from the level of automation we already have achieved. And it's probably also about how some benefit a lot more despite not working longer or harder.
So my point above was that while 'the system' does indeed 'trap' everyone into working, we have benefited a lot. If we had frozen our standard of living at a 1925 level and focused on working less, maybe by now we could have a three day (maybe even two day?) work-week. Though that assumes technology would have progressed as fast, despite somehow putting our standard of living into stasis.
However, it does feel like 'this time really is different'. The USA might not feel the full impact for the next few years, due to manufacturing re-shoring and Boomers retiring and maybe reduced immigration. But within five years - probably sooner - we'll start to feel unemployment pressure and resulting recession/depression risk, forcing adoption of a UBI not just for humanitarian reasons, but in order to maintain demand for goods and services to keep the economy from collapsing.
In in the Startrek Verse, Energy Credits are used. The cost is dependent on how much energy was used to produce an object.
This is also why when we imagine any hyper advanced civilizations irl, The Kardechev scale. any that controls all the resources and energy from their home planet is known as a type 1, a type 2 like you've pointed out here, is when a civilization controls all the energy from their star. scientists look for light fluctuations from stars, basically hinting at dyson spheres which is basically a spherical solor panel but just covers the whole star and takes every bit of energy it produces. so even in the future where matter synthesizer exist, energy is still limited, even if its quantity is many, meaning that such thing would have to exist to regulate the use of synthesizers so they can be used at least mostly optimally.
This show was wonderful. I loved every episode. Can’t wait for it to air again.
I want to know more about the scar city!
Post Scarcity is a Paradox. Even if machines could transmute random matter into Food the machines still need fuel and repairs.
People may have more access to food, Healthcare and technology but they won't have infinite Time, they can't live forever.
It's not a paradox, but it is almost certainly very hard to happen. To reach post scarcity, we would need near-limitless energy. The laws of thermodynamics rule out the possibility of truly limitless energy, but near-limitless is still possible and can bring about post-scarcity.
Energy is the one limiter to everything being scarce. WIth abundant energy, almost anything can be made at almost no expense. People don't comprehend that when we "work" we're just transforming energy into production. We turn the food we eat into energy, which we use to move our muscles to work and produce. Our society just commoditized energy into a measurable unit: money.
@@HVBRSoF Alternatively we'd have to reach a very high level of automation. If energy generation, manufacturing of necessary goods, and the routine maintenance of those systems was fully automated, then you could achieve a system indistinguishable from a post-scarcity system provided it is not overwhelmed by overpopulation.
It goes back to the old question about who works in Utopia? The slaves of course, but here you replace slaves with robots which is considerably more ethical.
Scar City sounds like an interesting but intrepid place to visit.
The problem is that people want to work to control and have dominance over other people. Power is it's own reward.
Too bad, cant do that when there are no hierarchical power structures to take over.
@silly_kitty170Studying animals that live social groups shows even they have hierarchical power structure too. You can take an ape out of the troop, but you can't take the troop out of the ape. This is just another part of the darkside of the human condition.
Even if we could some how magically get rid off the hierarchical power structure. Humans are just going to make a new one, intentionally or accidentally.
@silly_kitty170Humans evolved over the course of three million years to be hierarchical predatory pack hunter/gatherers. Even if we still to the half million years where humans have been definitively modern humans, the evolutionary instincts of 25,000 generations can’t be undone in a generation or two. Hell, civilization as we know it only emerged about 6000 years ago - 300 generations - and we still haven’t fully adapted to it. The lives we’ve chosen for ourselves are *not* the ones evolution chose for us, and most of our angsty issues and anomie and depression and aggression are the result of us living an inherently unnatural lifestyle, at odds with the niche we evolved for.
It can’t really be helped though. We’re stuck with the choices our stone-aged ancestors made
I agree, the desire to have dominance and control over fellow man is cancer
12:20 I like the video, so I gave it a like and you've got a sub. Great job.
Great video! I always get tears in my eyes when i see a SciFi show where they beat capitalism! Live could be so amazing...
BTW awesome news that the next season is still in the making!! i almost lost hope...
You can't beat capitalism. You can only beat human nature. But that is an endeavor that is near impossible to achieve because people don't like change.
Man, Besides the great concepts that you were able to see in that show, I just want to congratulate you for your grar investigation, Im new to this channel bur already a fan. Keep up the amazing work, its inspiring
As a socialist we want to provide people with meeting their material conditions. However, due to the fact that we'stern cou'ps, and inco'mpetent leader ship, socialism has never had the opportunity to work and thrive. Ive been studying it for two years now, and i can tell people it changed how i saw socialism and capitalism. Socialism has been scientifically proven to be better at meeting peoples needs than capitalism so yea.
I think I have to agree I've also been studying it
The Soviet Union, as imperfect as it was, already worked.
Remember, the USSR took the majority of the damage in WWII, and were the defenders of the cold war.
@vascofernandes295 absolutely
@vascofernandes295 I'm aware of the imperfections just like those in China
Thing is socialism has thrived, in places like china where the primary decision is not made for profit but for the country and people. this isn't even mentioning the many wonders and scientific achievement socialist countries have managed. the USSR started the space race, the US only joined as a response to the fact the soviets were doing it. even today china has some of the worlds largest dams and wonders being built continuously. and the primary difference from capitalism to socialism in our context simply is what is the primary decision maker of the country, do people or profits come first? is this country beholden to the liberal world orderor do they make their science-based decisions for the good of their people? socialism is scientifically better in the simple fact it can accurately work with and guide more variables in their given countries precisely, like a top down military unit command game where you can observe and control all within a given space. this control is paramount is exactly why the players can be competitive in the game. same applies to real life. this can simply seen in medical data and the amount of doctors per capita in the USSR versus even the richest capitalist countries at their peak. Also meaning projects of all kinds have the actual means of getting completed without the chaos of the market stifling and ruining any projects that happen in the country. privately owned or not, all answer the state which protects the people and country in such places. Or likean amaing lawyer with laws putting the people first without being bought out, like an 80s movie villain who loses because the country actually had and kept enforcable laws that protected the protagonist or what they were intending to defend. exactly why regulations in capitalist countries are for, only more expanded and directed not by possibly corrupted organizations and people. so no more decades-old train infrastructure that never gets completed, but fast paced, organized and precise production. no more just listening to what organizations beholden to capitalist influence and power but actual acted upon means of verifying information and the safe testing out for the good of the people in your country. socialism as a science and is never stagnant. meaning just relying on older texts won't do the absolute best for prospective students. good for foundations and history of course but it's ever changing and students need to be on top of such if they wish to not be tricked by capitalist misinformation and narratives, which unfortunately are extremely common and the exact reason why are so many people resistant to even learning more about it.
I highly recommend watching Yanis series: In the Eye of the storm. Are we about to turn the corner towards a post scarcity society? And also look into The Venus Project.
It's not hard to imagine what would happen if people did not work with their needs met. We already have a part of society that is exactly that. People who retire and have saved enough to continue their existing lifestyle. You will have people that do nothing, while others volunteer or invest time and effort in things they like.
Might be worth looking into trials of UBI. Overwhelmingly, people like to feel useful and have structure to their lives. The main difference is that they do work they actually like.
Another, group slightly different group who don't have to work to meet their basic needs, are the first nations in Canada, who get subsites from the government (basically a UBI. In those communities there is rampant tragedy where everyone is addicted to something and many take their own lives. It seems that without the need to find resources and engage in mutually beneficial endeavors with other humans, we waste away, drowned in our own hedonistic tendencies, and die. You can also see this in the kids of celebrities' and rich in the USA, with no point left in their life (all the money they could want right from the start) they tend toward self deletion and addiction. So why don't we see that in large numbers in the retired folks but do in these other cases? Maybe because the retired folks had to work for a lifetime to get where they are and it wasn't just handed to them. There really does seem to be something necessary for human mental health that is found in putting in effort to get what we need/want.
@@paulgibbon5991I mean, in the Orville they work for passion, but work in an organisation that helps them feel useful and productive without the cons of fears of losing your livelihood.
@@lexpox329 Yeah, handouts will inevitably foster a culture of inferiority and, on some level, resentment which does not lend well to mental health. Here in the US, the Navajo suffer from addiction and high suicide rates as well.
On an interpersonal level, there is a way to avoid this. If you see someone who needs money, but don't want to harm their sense of self-worth by giving them a handout, what you can do is hire them to do something for you. It doesn't have to be something huge and something you really need to hire someone to do, but as long as its plausible enough, you can help them and avoid the sense of inferiority and resentment the recipient (thru no fault of their own) would feel as a result.
After all, who's going to turn down a job that seems very well-paying for what it is? And there is the added psychological benefit in that they feel they've earned the money rather than just being given it out of pity. The trick is how you would apply this to entire groups of people.
Something to add to this is that if purpose is driven by passion then nobody needs to criticise anything. Currently money dictates that only 1 entity should be the victor; therefore we all feel the need to have a say. The alternative is to risk studying years only to have our employment rejected.
Capitalism is competition. Conflict is part of the design.
Youre pfp wtf
i like the plot of thease sci-fi show i absolutly hate the shuttle desigh where the center of thrust is WAY above the center of mass, the shuttles would spiral uncontrolably. not to mention in the first few episodes where the three destroys the krill ship and 2/3 of the engines are destroyed AND THE SHIP STILL FLYS STRAIGHT
These spaceships don't work using conventional "thrust" , don't worry
It's space, nothing is straight. And since they have different tech, I'd say the way they propel themselves is powered in a way that doesn't destroy the thruster. Plus it is sci fi so let's have fun with weird ahh designs
There are 2 main problems with the argument presented by The Orville:
1) Technology never comes *after* we're prepared for it. In all cases throughout history, the technology comes first, and *then* society changes as a result. If we need to wait for society to be prepared for a revolutionary technology, we will literally never get that technology. But that's not how it works, it's always the exact opposite.
2) The technology itself renders the problem moot. There would be no realistic scenario where someone hoards or gatekeeps a technology like the matter synthesizer, because a matter synthesizer would be able to create more matter synthesizers. Even if a greedy billionaire has the only one in the world, they have friends and family who they will want to give one to, which they can do with the push of a button for free. And those people have yet more friends and family they want to give one to. So eventually it will spread exponentially throughout society in this way. Even in the most extreme case where the greedy billionaire doesn't give one to anyone else, they will eventually die and someone else will have it. Eventually someone will start the distribution process. But most likely it will start right away. A technology that self-replicates for free is not something that can be realistically contained.
However, that also means that evil people will have access to the technology as well. So we could very well end up destroying ourselves as a result of it, but the reason will not be because people are fighting for control of the technology itself, but rather because of the fact that literally everyone will have access to it.
The paranoia and unfounded bias against profit is pretty annoying. I too yearn for a post scarcity society, but we don’t get there by vilifying people who have created massive value and succeeded. Capitalism is being blamed for atavisms endemic to human nature.
This is the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" ahh logic.
Scarcity is the essence of value and appreciation.
Without scarcity there will be boredom, decadence, and lack of appreciation.
Happiness is the mental phenomenon when scarcities are gradually met with fulfillment.
The ideal state of harmony is when scarcities are constantly arises and fulfilled.
This is the universal law of harmonious entropy.
Not lopsided to any one end of either scarcity and abundance.
I think you've been brainwashed by today's capitalist system.
My sense of fullfilment has nothing to do with satisfying my material desires and I think/ hope a good portion of the population will think the same.
Halo was born to show human civilization to be an "after-Capitalist" civilization.
But after Bungie... It all became a copy-past of America. 😑
Not in the sense there wasn't money as you probably imagine, but rather because the "Unified Earth Government" of Halo universe was literally a socialist interstellar civilization.
That don't preclude the existance of corporations, free market or else, but it poses concrete and neat limits to what these things can do and how can they affects the human society.
Through lore of Halo you can see how Healthcare was not just free, but even spanned and was offered to ALL the colonies.
On Earth, the center of that human Civilization, people didn't knew what cancer is. They had access to fresh food, jobs, every kind of transport system, journalism fluorished over every colony, as we got news from journalists of the time, from remote colonies, about terrorist attacks.
So freedom of speech, information and opinion was a right granted by the UEG not just on Earth, but throughout the whole hunan space.
Military service was voluntary, only voluntary. No conscription.
Also politics was quite denocratic by having delegations and representatives of every colonies partecipating to the Senate of Earth.
In the decision-maker institution of such nation.
Of course that could have also been not fair, since bigger colonies had more representatives than small colonies, but nonetheless all had their respesentation in the government. All had the chance to get elected or even to run for the charge of President of the Unified Earth Government.
And that's real democracy. No matter how small a colony could have been, it had that chance.
Ironically, through the UEG history, they had to face wars started by the major ideologies that still today tries to rule our world: the Rain Wars in South America waged by the Koslovich communist forces.
The Mars campaign against Frieden fascist forces.
And the Insurrection wars against capitalists in the most remote colonies of UEG space.
After the Human-Covenant War that constitute the bulk of the story of the first trilogy of games, capitalists actually had the chance to enstablish their power over a single planet and get their independence from UEG.
And that planet/colony is Venezia.
But unlike other sci-fi titles where war is always the answer, in Halo there's a rather peaceful coexistance even there. With Venice left alone by UEG that sincerely don't want to mess up with the Colony.
Problem is that Venezia is also an hotbed for not just insurrectionists but also post-Covenant factions where Humans and Alien species mix togheter creating an unique society.
While in the UEG, communities of mixed Humans and Aliens are welcomed in the consessus of Human worlds like normal colonies.
It means that despite the genocidal camoaign of the Covenant against Earth and her colonies, the UEG is actually granting rights and citizenship even to those same Aliens they had as enemies in the previous war.
It may look insane, but it's also very propositive. Very healthy. Because it's not just democracy at its finest, it shows moral values, the will to build a better future for all, mercy, respect for life... I mean, all those things you expect to come from a true democratic government.
But of course, Halo is a wargame, it needs crisis to live up. So there must be elements of destabilization.
Some of these are factions that lies both inside and outside the UEG.
Outside for example we have the Banished. A group of raiders and pirates that pursuit true freedom through violence.
Terrorists as we define them.
Inside UEG there's the ONI. That after the Human-Covenant War have growth paranoid about what aliens can do and are now willing to cripple and destroy every potential alien power that could treat the UEG.
And techbically speaking, it's not even the entirety of the Office of Naval Intelligence but rather just one of its Divisions. The dark and obscure "Section-Three" that its tasked with soecial projects and initiatives to protect Earth and its colonies.
So it's a dynamic universe where there are contrasting and contrapposed forces that are not necessarely "evil" or "good" but just "human".
To me, there's no greater sci-fi title than Halo. It's the absolute best.
I read about scientific breakthroughs all the time. Solar cells that are stronger, engines that are cleaner or more efficient, etc. Political macinations keep them from ever seeing the light of day. 💔
Tesla was said to have invented a way to directly tap the electricity passing from the sun to the planet 😂 where's Tesla now? 😢😢