Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

diverging paths for humans and transhumans

lol, try replacing humans with middle-class and transhumans with ultra-wealthy

sometime in the 22nd century the USA will pass the 10 percent mark for it's population in jail/prison as government prisons are defunded, private-prisons become even more profitable as inmates are forced to pay for their incarceration with labor for pennies per hour, and lawmakers are paid by prison-industry lobbyists to make more offenders - the supreme court rules that judges may own stock in prisons, etc. - TSA will be allowed to collect DNA samples during random roadblocks, etc.

Humanity spreads throughout the local stellar neighbourhood, as Earth is restored to its former beauty

Wouldn't a better name for this site have been "future fantasy" ?

I mean I love the ideas but it's complete fantasy. The earth is going to be a pile of people trying to climb over each other economically, only to feed the ultra-weathly on top. Law-enforcement is going to be a multi-trillion dollar a year industry because it will be the only way to keep the masses at their jobs and not protesting.

One of the stories in Cory Doctorow's "With a Little Help" is based on the problem of what do you sell to an "immortal, sovereign quadrillionaire living in a vat"

http://craphound.com/walh/

[Edit: The whole of "With a Little Help" is available for free as a podcast, with the stories being read by some interesting folks:

http://www.archive.org/details/WithALittleHelpPodcasts

]

what do you sell to an "immortal, sovereign quadrillionaire living in a vat"

that's easy - you arrest them and make them buy their freedom

corporations buy their way out of law-breaking every other day by paying fines, not one day served

you arrest them and make them buy their freedom

In the context of singularity sci-fi literature, the important question here is "How do you convince them to let you do that?", because a sufficiently advanced intelligence doesn't need your permission to do anything. It's like ants versus Toyota: you lack the mental capacity to see the breadth of the system which you're enmeshed in -- your moving around little grains of dirt doesn't even register at the smallest scales of operation of a multinational company. If you're thinking "the government could regulate the fleshy-AI-corporation-thingee to bits", you're playing the game so many levels below the AI that you very might well be one of his pieces and just not know it.

Some people would argue that is the status quo in the political system regarding regulation of megacorps. I'm close to agnostic on that.

The word "sovereign" in that description was not extraneous. In the story, these being tend to literally be countries, in the manner that a King used to be the country. You can't arrest them. They are the ones doing the arresting.

sometime in the 22nd century the USA will pass the 10 percent mark for it's population in jail

Most of the rise in prison population is down to the US government's war on drugs, as crime rates in general have been falling for some time now. However, there are global signs that drug laws are starting to be relaxed, so prison populations in a generation's time may be much smaller than they are today.

I mean I love the ideas but it's complete fantasy. The earth is going to be a pile of people trying to climb over each other economically, only to feed the ultra-weathly on top.

Your version of the future sounds just as much a fantasy, just in the other direction.

I find it odd that people tend to fixate upon dystopian futures, when all trends point toward the opposite direction. Crime has been steadily decreasing, people are becoming more tolerant of others, most people are wealthier, less people are dying of disease and war, environmental damage is starting to be reversed by first world economies, more renewable energy sources are being used, etc., etc.

I guess in some respects its good that people tend to fixate on the negatives, as otherwise nothing would ever be fixed.

A prediction like that based on current social fears as as accurate as the prediction that by 2000 the world would be destroyed by The (nucelar) Bomb

Or the Y2K bug.

Given how close we came to all our nuclear war on at least two occasions I don't think that was necessarily a bad prediction.

Edit: the two occasions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

Indeed. Nuclear proliferation is an increasing problem, and while we now lack the superpower standoff where a war could destroy most of humanity, many states are now capable of blowing up a large chunk of the world.

It's probably only a matter of time.

It's more like the prediction that by 1950 there would be so many horses and buggies that the streets of London will be knee-deep in horse poop.

Also it's not a prediction, it's more of a soapbox.

Some of humanity's best toys have come from a bit of harmless science fantasy, so I'm all for it here. Speculation tends to break down when dealing with anything beyond a decade, anyway.

Extrapolation doesn't predict the future.

Sure it does. I've also extrapolated to figure out that by the time 10% of the US population is in prison, the other 90% will all be Elvis impersonators.

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