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Comment by worldsayshi | Hacker News Reader

I think there are scenarios, however (un)likely that will lead us to this point. Imaging them and spreading such ideas can make that more likely.

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But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.

Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.

This is kind of why we need more Star Trek. Not that I don’t enjoy others, but I prefer space communism to almost any other possible future, especially the ones Peter Thiel has reserved for us.

Read more Star Trek then, the Peter Thiel world came first and the survivors made the Star Trek world.

And there was a nuclear war as well. I know that, and I’m happy it’s not often we explore that in detail or treat the “dark age of Star Trek” as something that could be normalised. It’s always portrayed as a barbaric time humanity escaped from through by growing up.

I find this idea that we need to go through hell to reach salvation to be such a common trope. An unhelpful one. It affects how we see relationships and mental health too.

Maybe we should seek out the good things directly and not act as if the bad things are somehow going to purify us.

If we can skip the Thiel version of Hell, we really should.

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