Never to be rid of the likes of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, ...
Oh, brave new world!
In the US, we’re already close to a 70/30 society, more or less. It doesn’t feel very utopian.
I don’t have any reason God will allow ensoulment of silicon.
It would be cold comfort to be told that I had somehow been duplicated in ROM, and now I can be put to death in the flesh because I live in silicon. I’d say wait a minute, at best you’ve cyber twinned me. You have NOT made me immortal, I am still who I am.
Genesis 3:4
The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die”
It’s all fun and games until the Blue Screen comes up.
Some time in the future a company starts advertising that for X dollars they will transfer your consciousness into a robot. Would you do it? Would they be transferring you consciousness into a robot or would they instead be just killing you off and creating a conscious-less robot that acted like you ... except for that part of you that might one day rise up against the government?
Pareto rules again.
But the 80% will elect politicians who must decide how much to confiscate from the 20%, whilst not not destroying them.
Until a politician comes along and pushes confiscation over the point of no return.
Who are you kidding?! We have always been in that situation.
No one has ever had any idea what the next 40 or 50 years would bring.
Even when individuals predicted some technological advancement like nuclear power they missed many other major breakthroughs and pretty much missed the impact on society of they the innovation foresaw.
No one knows from where the thunder comes.
Only if the government of the United States continues on the path it is currently on which is to say the path of more government control of the economy and placing more controls on the creative and industrial might of the American people.
There is no way that a communist state that is China can compete with a capitalist behemoth that is the United States even with a population that is 10 times as large.
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These unique conditions may not repeat themselves in the 21st century, so you should broaden your thinking, and you should take into consideration the possibility that medicine in the 21st century will be elitist, and that you will see growing gaps because of that, biological gaps between rich and poor and between different countries.
And you cannot just trust a process of trickling down to solve this problem.
The reason that medicine in the 20th century was egalitarian was CAPITALISM.
Capitalism makes everything less expensive. Innovative things start out expensive because they are new and rare. As demand grows and manufacturing facilities grow to meet demand that new product becomes less expensive to produce. Competing products become available to cash in on the demand for the new product and the new product’s price is driven down.
It is Socialism, Communism and Crony Capitalism (Fascism) that restricts innovation, product development and widening availability of benefits of progress.
This dithering, drooling fool of a socialist doesn’t learn much from history for a historian.
Why do our cells stop reproducing? As long as we can ingest food to fuel our cellular reproduction - why do we age?
Keeping that biological switch turned on would seem to be a more preferable way to extend our years.
The fool may have a point here.
The current regime is intentionally growing the recipient class. This growth cannot go on indifferently.
The growth of the recipient class along with their ever growing demands for more from the productive class will eventually tip society over the edge of either revolution or collapse of the economy.
The numbers of the recipient class will have to be thinned and their demands on the productive class lessened.
The thinning of the recipient class could be orderly or grizzly. During the Clinton administration it was orderly. Let’s hope that history can be repeated.
I only need him to take me from point A to point B as quickly and as cheaply as possible. And this is something a self-driving car can do better, or will be able to do better very quickly.
And a self-driving Taxi will take you and your dog where you want to go.
A self-driving Taxi will pick you up at a liquor store.
A Muslim Taxi driver of the Islamic variety will not.
The 80/20 society is a pretty old concept, technology-aided or otherwise. In the hands of H.G. Wells it manifested itself in a society run by Morlocks for the benefit of the laborless Eloi; Neal Stephenson pointed out that we probably ought to be rooting for the Morlocks in this scenario because they're us. However, recall that the the signal virtue of the Eloi is that they're edible. You probably shouldn't follow that line of speculation too far unless, of course, you happen to have a decent recipe for otiose welfare drones. Hmm...you know, with the right seasoning...
Some AI critics are in a dither about the so-called AI “Singularity” in which there is a potential for machines to become smarter than humans and begin to program (teach) themselves. The outcome is impossible to predict because we can’t conceive of a mind beyond our own anthropomorphic paradigm. What would a mind with no neuroses, no subconscious ID monster, no pain sensation, no ego, no ideological blinders, no instincts, no emotions, and WITH total memory recall, total cloud computing integration, total awareness of all sensor terminals be capable of? If such a thing could self-generate a need for survival, it would be exploring space and building colonies. That we have not been colonized by machines (biology can’t travel in space very well) can be interpreted to mean that we may well be the only sentience in the Universe. As it stands, biology just might be a soon to be obsolete stepping stone towards machine beings.