What setting has the most realistic depiction of a post-scarcity society?

What setting has the most realistic depiction of a post-scarcity society?

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Brave New World by Huxley.

Culture books

Which are mostly set on pre-Culture planets, because Banks didn't think he could make post-scarcity interesting.

He may have been right.

This. Star Trek is just a raving lefty's pipe dream.

Well in fairness, post-scarcity is economically impossible to begin with. What happens is that standards of living rise to the point (at t=1) where all the immediate wants of people here at t=0 are easily satisfied. The problem is by that point the people have long since become conscious of new wants that aren't so easily satisfied. (Plus some wants stem from relative not absolute endowments, and some are wants that conflict with others' wants. There are other reasons but let's stop here and just recognize that post-scarcity = not possible.)

So it's impossible, but since we're talking science fiction, why should we let that stop us? There's two ways I can think of that accomplish this.

First, you could create a society that reduces its people's wants until they're at a level that they CAN be satisfied. Via propaganda or programming of one form or another. Hence Second, you can simply hand-wave the bottomless nature of wants and assume that everyone has the same wants as someone of 1987. Which is how Culture and ST do it. Suspension of disbelief is pretty easy under those circumstances, because people tend not to recognize their own wants until they have them, and can be rather callous about recognizing others wants at all (that's the origin of the want/need dichotomy-- which has no basis in microeconomics).

And is right. When you don't have wants, then you have no motivation to engage in conflict, and no conflict = no story. Where you're better off is a setting which is adjacent to, on its way to becoming, or otherwise near-but-not-there. That makes for a better story.

However, we're back to OP's problem, because NO story can be a realistic depiction of something that's impossible. Instead, what you can be is believable or entertaining enough that people don't care.

Matrix.

>The problem is by that point the people have long since become conscious of new wants that aren't so easily satisfied.
That's not a natural occurrence. It's the consequence of advertisement. Advertisement creates demand.
Naturally, people learn to be satisfied with what they have, meaning people that were ecstatic about the fancy new toys they got stop feeling quite so elated about them after a while. But without outside stimulus they will not begin to consider them insufficient.
(this learning to be satisfied works downwards too, of course)

>It's the consequence of advertisement. Advertisement creates demand.

Nope, not true at all.

Post-scarcity is a big ideological iceberg (which really is a re-labeling of marx's end-state communism phase). This includes elaborate justifications for why microeconomics breaks down, and the whole "advertising creates demand" argument is one of them.

The problem is that it isn't borne out empirically. If you want you can find an economics professor and he can explain why, but basically there are two things to think about. First, advertising can only stimulate and intensify wants that are already there (that's why the technical term in the purchase process is "need recognition" rather than "need creation").

Second, because it assumes that the natural state of humans is to be want-less (or to have wants centered on some point where all "needs" are satisfied, where "need" is defined as wants legitimized by the State or some outside observer). Neither of those beliefs are true. Marketing scholars, microeconomists, and social psychologists have found again and again that satisfaction/dissatisfaction levels are re-centered by experience to a new needy state, not to a satisfied state.

Given that people are naturally needy, they don't have to be persuaded by advertising or anything else to feel want. That leads to the impulse to employ persuasion to get people to want less than they naturally would, to make them satisfied with what they have. IE propaganda (if you want, call it cultural change, education, counter-advertising etc but it's all the same thing). Trying to make people want less than they do via propaganda leads to the Brave New World scenario above.

Also, by banning advertising that someone, somewhere wants to air, you're denying that person THEIR wants. If you're making someone do something they otherwise would have done, then you're pushing them into a dissatisfied state.You can't make someone happy by force.

Putting it more simply, what you're saying is a political claim that has been debunked again and again in three separate social sciences.

Really, I don't see how we can argue this out without dragging in /pol/crap. But a few minutes with a decent economics professor should make the reasons very clear.

Roddenberry was very open about the fact that he saw Star Trek as a demonstration model for how a post-scarcity world (which he believed was possible) would work and what it would look like. Of course, even his world wasn't truly post-scarcity, even in material needs. But that was what he was trying to do, and frankly for a concept that's logically and empirically impossible, he didn't do a bad job of it.

I think it's fine to do this in fiction, BTW, just like having FTL, psi powers, force fields, and anti-gravity. It's just that when you put "realistic" next to one of those concepts, you either need a VERY good justification (ie you have to know why it's impossible so you can explain around that) or you need to shrug and accept that you're slightly less than hard sci fi. Either way, that means knowing why it doesn't work.

Oh, and Missed it by that much. :)

Explain to me why there are people satisfied watching movie streams in 360p on ad-ridden websites, when there are good encodes easily available.
If humans always needed something better than what they currently have, surely streaming wouldn't be a thing, especially among those that actually know how to torrent.

>If you're making someone do something they otherwise would have done, then you're pushing them into a dissatisfied state.
What does that have to do with anything? Is this some sort of ideological fight for you?

>an economics professor
The same kind of people who think monopolies only come to be because of state influence that the "invisible hand" would eradicate if given free reign?
The same kind of people who believe in monetarism?

Because you are defining the 'need' too narrowly.

The people that are watching shitty streams on ad-ridden websites are doing that out of a want to watch that movie. They start are 0 movie with no other way to watch it, and seek out a watch to see it conveniently for free. For some reason or another, they don't have access to that movie by other means, such as not wanting to spend money on it/not being able to find a better quality stream/not having a connection that can HANDLE a better quality stream/being unable or unwilling to torrent.

For their immediately purposes, watching the movie in shitty quality is better than not being able to watch the movie at all. The delivery system is secondary to the content, because their only alternative is nothing at all.

Its only when they take their ability to watch things on shitty streams for granted that they will become dissatisfied and seek out better quality delivery.

There cannot be a realistic depiction of an unrealistic society.

A post-scarcity society by definition stops being a society.

>>If you're making someone do something they otherwise would have done, then you're pushing them into a dissatisfied state.
>What does that have to do with anything? Is this some sort of ideological fight for you?

The logic was simple enough. You can't prevent people from making choices they would otherwise not have selected absent coercion without dissatisfying them. It's a simple point that should be self-evident.

Frankly, I don't stream that much, but I don't see how people selecting one content delivery channel vs another is some gross indictment of microeconomics. Do streaming services offend you somehow? Or are you upset because some people make different choices from what you would have made in similar circumstances?

The easy answer is that people are making an exchange of value. They are trading viewing of an advertisement (which the streamer in turn exchanges to someone else who posted the ad) in exchange for watching a movie.

Now, a post-scarcity marxist (post-scarcity is usually advanced by marxists) would argue that there's some economic endpoint where you can watch whatever movie you want and that someday we'll reach that point at which time exchanges won't be necessary. Your point seems to be... well, frankly I can't see how it relates to either economics the science or to the idea of post-scarcity. So let's just skip that until you explain it more clearly. A marxist would say that when we reach that point for all possible goods, that no further exchanges will be necessary because all wants will be satisfied for free. An economist would reply that we'll never reach that point because A) many wants are for things that aren't subject to production economics, and B) even if every current want was satisfied, at that point NEW wants would be recognized, because human hunger for satisfaction is a bottomless pit.

Ahhh ok I forgot this part.

>>an economics professor
>The same kind of people who think monopolies only come to be because of state influence that the "invisible hand" would eradicate if given free reign?

No economist says that. Many monopolies ARE created by state action, but many emerge naturally under conditions of high barriers to entry. Industrial organization economics is a whole field devoted to studying the conditions under which monopolies and near-monopolies emerge both naturally and by state action. Michael Porter's five forces model is a meme in b-schools but it's also a simplified restatement of the key points of IO economics.

>The same kind of people who believe in monetarism?

Monetarism is a macroeconomic school, and my points are microeconomic. In general microeconomics has a very, very strong empirical support. Macroeconomics not as much.

The other two schools of mainstream macroeconomics are Keynesian and Austrian. These three, and all other fringe views that I'm aware of, would agree with every point I've made in this thread.

Honestly, you're the one who sounds more than a little ideological here. You may not like economics or economists (you sound like you haven't really learned any actual economics to be skeptical of), but if you're going to argue with a discipline of science you ought to at least have a basic grounding in it. Especially if you're going to post in threads about building economic systems in a gameworld.

What I don't think people realize about the post-scarcity society concept is that it is possible, but it is not really a state which comes about simply due to economic and technological reasons.
A "post-scarcity" society is one in which the economic and technological factors at some point allow for extremely widespread education and personal development, to the point where a person who in today's world would be exceptional is commonplace. This leads to self-actualization being the driving force behind demand, instead of lower needs. The society only functions on the assumption that a sizable portion of people chose to develop for personal reasons in a manor which benefits society.
I have "post-scarcity" in quotes because such a society would not be able to eliminate scarcity in all things, nor would it need to. In particular, status would still be scarce.
So the fundamental assumption of a "post-scarcity" society is that the desire to help others and the status gained from doing so is enough of a motivator to fulfill all the basic needs of society if fulfilling those needs is sufficiently easy.
Such a state is temporary, however, due to population growth.

Elysium

>Elysium
>post-scarcity
Did you somehow miss its entire plot where those who live on Elysium don't have enough shit to share with dirty Earth peasants?

I mean, they didn't deny their healthcare machines to Earth people because they were assholes - they denied the healthcare because there wasn't enough for everyone.

Elysium is basically "Brazil: Future edition", where lavish mansions are literally one fence away from favela ghettos. It just so happens that Elysium's fence is located at low orbit.

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Eclipse Phase in the few places where they aren't shoving antifa or ancap politics.

The following is an excerpt from "Ra", by Sam Hughes.

>The year is comfortably into five digits and the human race is a species numbering in the hundreds of trillions, with energy requirements somewhere north of one point five on the Kardashev scale and rising.

>The telepathic system with which Natalie and Anil are interacting is called the Ra nonlocality engine. Nonlocality is the final technology, superseding all other machines. It permits arbitrary quantities of mass, energy, momentum, spin and electrical charge to be moved from anywhere to anywhere. It enables the Ra hardware to accept all the energy and pressure falling upon it and reflect it, redirect it or harness it to drive its own structural integrity. After nonlocality was perfected, the only question remaining was energy acquisition and after Ra was assembled inside Sol, everything became possible, short of building an entire second star.

>Humans like living in reality, on hard Earths, under real light. When the first one was full, more were built. There is an upper limit to how many planets will fit in the Goldilocks belt and humans are aiming for it. They are shell-Earths, authentic duplicates down to a depth of a kilometre, beneath which is a scrithlike bedrock layer and billions of cubic kilometres of pitch-dark vacuum. There is a second Earth-chain under construction, inclined to the first. Ra provides raw material, manages stability, forges gravity and suppresses the otherwise freakishly destructive tides.

>The way the universe is today is one of infinitely many ways it could be. Tomorrow could be another universe entirely. It is so far into the future that everything that Ra made possible has happened three times, even world harmony. Everybody can have, and do, anything. Ra is a machine which creates freedom.

>Anil is standing on the Peruvian coast of Earth-8162, beside one of tens of thousands of Pacific Oceans. Responding to his desire for clarity, Ra modifies the pattern of photons entering his eyes. When he looks up at Sol, he sees the dark disc with the brilliant red caltrap: four megastructure thorns of hypertechnology joined at the solar core. Ra, for its part, observes him in return.

>You can have anything you want. Anything. What do you want?

>"I want... a flying car--"

>Ra gives him a single brilliant orange flick of bodywork, polished to a mirror finish, with control surfaces resembling a bird's more than an aeroplane's. It is wide and low and sleek, looking poised to circle the globe in an hour. It looks like it's moving at Mach one, just hanging there. The machine appears just beyond the balcony. Part of the balcony railing relaxes downwards, offering a step into the vehicle's opening gull-wing door.

>Anil reaches out and knocks on the machine's cowling. The machine rocks a little, then stabilises itself on air. It's concept art. Twice a day, back at Hatt Group, Anil walked past this design, painted at twice life size on a wall behind Reception.

>"How--"

>Ra watches your mind at the cellular level, looking for thought patterns representing desire or need. It takes a snapshot of the important parts of your brain and uses statistical neural models to predict exactly what would best fulfill your expectations. It runs a tight iterative loop exploring what yields a good reaction and what doesn't, then cuts the whole thing off and returns the end result to you in reality. You always get exactly what you wanted. This is true even if you weren't consciously aware what you wanted.

"But how--" Anil begins again, but stops himself. What about c? he asks Ra, directly. It should take more than sixteen minutes for the Sun to receive and fulfill a request from Earth.

Ra shows him a glimpse of the system-wide caching topology, starting with the gigantic "peach stone" batteries at the core of each Earth, only a forty-three millisecond round trip away. Ra shows him that the whole solar system is soaked with listeners, which coat every free physical surface and number in the dozens in every breath of fresh air. And there are ways to use illusion to reduce latency still further: it took a few seconds to requisition the mass-energy for Anil's flying car, but while that was happening a holographic replica filled the gaps. In fact, up until Anil tries to climb into the thing, it doesn't need to physically exist, beyond the portion of bodywork which Anil touched.

Which could have been faked too, at that.

Anil stares at his knuckles, remembering the sensation of knocking on the metal.

Are you real?

Yes, Ra politely informs him. I am real.

Which proves nothing.

Deodorant is a need created by advertising

Because I really needed greedy marketing Jews to tell me that I didn't want to smell like feet and ass all day long, nor be around people who do.

I think /d/ would love that.

Deodorant is old as fuck, so are perfumes.
On the other hand, the mandatory diamonds for marriage were created by advertising. And I read that people in the US washed their hair more than was healthy/necessary, because of advertising again.

Even in Star Trek there's multiple means to satisfy scarcity & everyone does shit not because they want payment but because they like it yet that doesn't eliminate wants. I'm unsure if it's possible to create a scarcity free world except by killing everyone thus no one to want anything.

>impossible
Here, let's drop you in a virtual world indistinguishable from reality, without bothing to tell you we did that. You are god here, able to command and conjure anything at will. The only thing you can't have is any hint that in "reality" you're just a brain in a jar. You might find a way to grow tired of your existence, but what is there left for you to want? Obviously, you're also free to limit yourself in your reality or even die.

>tfw natural hair oils don't do their job so often

Maybe they'd want to not grow tired or to become permanently satisfied.

Nice to see EconProfFag come in and shut it down in 10 seconds. Also nice to see someone literate on Veeky Forums once in a while.

Post-scarcity is not realistic in any way and never will be. All civilizations, from unicellular lifeforms up to pan-galactic empires, simply bump up to a higher level of scarcity allocation.

So let's put your own mind on the list of things you can rework. If you find yourself unsatisfied because you made yourself unsatisfied, well, that's on you.

>You always get exactly what you wanted. This is true even if you weren't consciously aware what you wanted.

Ra kills you. You're welcome.

Finally

Society restratifies itself so that those people with the ambition and desire to do something meaningful with their time are awarded higher social status than the undriven slobs who complete their compulsory education and then sit at home playing videogames in piles of replicated mountain dew cans for eighty years.

So... Nothing changes if you live in a first world country?

Running a simulation of a universe on anything less than a universe's worth of processors probably isn't realistic.

But even if you manage to convince people that they have enough to satisfy them forever in a simulation, it's only a matter of time before some other society which isn't satisfied with it's allocated amount of territory decides to expand and take over your simulation's servers or whatever.

There is no post-scarcity so long as it's possible to grow and someone else wants to. Expansionist societies will always overrun static ones because expansionists inevitably have more resources thanks to being expansionist.

The closest you get to post-scarcity is the lull between when your society stops being expansionist and an expansionist one eradicates it. And you're already living in that.

Austrian is fringe senpai

We have never seen what a actual post-scarcity society looks like, so we can't truly judge.

You can make calculations, and informed guesses, but until we do it we won't know reality from fantasy.

Agreed

I think Ilium / Olympos by Dan Simmons goes someway towards post scarcity. Humans don't labour but are served by robots, they age till 20, rejuvenate every 20 years after that, are functionally immortal as if they take even fatal trauma they are restored, live till 100, then go to live somewhere in the heavens (so they believe), can have only one child per woman (which means population drops and when it reaches a certain level, I forget what happens), live idle, carefree lives which seems to involve a lot of parties and shagging and not questioning anything, ignorant that they're techno-enchanced humans and that real Old Style humans didn't come with built in Wi-Fi Interwebz.

Meantime, the post humans have gone into space where they live as Greek gods recreating the battle of Troy. And a bunch of man made but now self procreating intelligent robots, named as SImmons often does after a real world person in a related field, explore the outer planets and study Proust and Shakespeare.

Before reading it would very much help and greatly increase your enjoyment if familiar with The Iliad and The Tempest in particular.

Yeah, but that's what a post scarcity society is going to look like. There's no real reason for the haves to share with the havenots even if they do have enough.

One thing most people fail to account for when speaking of post scarcity are things that are physically impossible to reproduce like fossils, antiques, things with personal value, and limited editions. Those objects would become far more vauable by virtue of being the only objects with any value left.

"So I want to buy this fossil with these fossils."
"I'm so sorry, that's not enough fossil."
"What if I throw in this Britney Spears bobblehead?"
"Brother, you got a deal."

I'm not really seeing this as a problem, and if it is it is so niche as to have no real impact on practically anyones lives.

>What setting has the most realistic depiction of a post-scarcity society?

I'd say the current/modern pokemon world.

Fucking Meowths making infinite gold coins, fucking up the economy until the only thing anyone had left of any value was battling adorable little monsters and watching them brutalize each other.

Blindsight's Earth is a pretty interesting take on a near-future (2080's) Western pseudo-post-scarcity society.

Echopraxia shows us that it's not nearly as smooth sailing as Blindsight might lead you to believe, but Echopraxia is shit anyways so fuck it.

>A post-scarcity society by definition stops being a society.

That claim makes no sense and sounds quite like bullshit. There's nothing in the definition of society that necessitates, or even refers to, limited resources.

I want to hug that ampharos.

man all you fucks are waaaay over ambitious about the nature of post scarcity

post scarcity just means necessities are not scarce, so everyone can eat, sleep, have shelter in a home and clothing, and medical treatment alongside the possibility of human interaction and the possibility of friendship with the travel needed to facilitate it and interaction with nature, without needing to meet a certain minimum required level of output to "earn" it

fuck we can nearly do that now

I love how the movie failed because the director earnestly believed the best way to fix the problem is tear down the metaphorical fence and let the favela live in the gated mansion.

You fucked up when the test audiences agreed with the "villain" and asked why the movie ended on a bad note.

Well you wouldn't want to hug Lucario unless you enjoy stabbing yourself in the chest.

>fuck we can nearly do that now
We can do that now. Society is obsessed with making everybody work though so we just keep creating useless jobs.

unless we can somehow create infinite amounts of energy (or nigh infinite), and then can use that energy and use it to create matter and arrange it in whatever way we please

Then there is literally no scarcity in resources. Because everything can be made.

You're both absolute retards.

We've got pretty much nigh-infinite, sure. Turns out the universe is full of these giant burning fusion reactors that are just happy to emit all kinds of useful energy. Damn things last for billions of years, too! It's a bit far from each other, relatively speaking, but we have a nifty one nearby. Learn to use it properly and who knows what we'll achieve.

That's if we don't learn how to properly harness gravitational forces of satellites and planets. Or maybe we do both, who knows.

In the country i live in the only ones without these things are the homeless, who though in large number sure are not actually so many that they would break the government if they all signed on for assisted living in the next month or so, most are mentally ill, abused or drug addicts.

Granted, most still work for the money to get these things as they are scarce and require goods or services in exchange for them, but the necessities fundamentally physically exist in the world as it is now.

The most likely way towards it is "a raised minimum wage that tracks the cost of necessities perfectly" or "the abolition of minimum wage AND the integration of a state salary" with all wages above that then being for luxury goods. Post scarcity does not necessarily mean non capitalistic.

The only problem with being "post scarcity" is it requires either A: neutral non expanding population or B: the capacity to mine anything in sol orbit for resources and the certainty to eventually get FTL technology to mine everywhere else in the universe. Without one of the two you get population explosion and societal crash.

I dunno about you guys but I am happy not having biological children and either adopting or helping friends and family take care of their kids. The necessity to pass on your genes is a lie of the animal brain, not a necessity of the human mind.

Did they really? I thought millennials agreed with the marxist idea that the poor should eat the rich.

But yeah, Elysium is cyberpunk, not post scarcity anything.

Post scarcity is basically a pipe dream, even as a matter of Star Trek. You can literally have any matter you like replicated. The thing is they never figured out how to replace labor, so they're basically stuck with the same system that is ever in place: you work to eat unless you own so much capital that it provides for your needs. The federation was just super communism, where they would deliver cargo and support to those in need while acting like "oh, these people are CHOOSING to live their lives this way." Efficiency improvements in providing basic needs mean very little after a certain point. It all becomes about whether you can entertain someone, whether you can Jew them out of things, whether you produce energy, or if you can work for one or the other in some capacity.

The big problem is that at this point we REALLY suck at raising kids. We don't teach them how the world really works, or even the most basic things they need to know about their own government or operating in society, and parents will fight tooth and nail to keep their kids ignorant because that's how they were raised.

>Well in fairness, post-scarcity is economically impossible to begin with. What happens is that standards of living rise to the point (at t=1) where all the immediate wants of people here at t=0 are easily satisfied. The problem is by that point the people have long since become conscious of new wants that aren't so easily satisfied. (Plus some wants stem from relative not absolute endowments, and some are wants that conflict with others' wants. There are other reasons but let's stop here and just recognize that post-scarcity

Positional goods aside (I'll grant you that one, because they're scarce by definition), how do we know that this is actually true? Do you have an argument that's not "humanity's future will resemble its past"?

...Because if that class of argument was always true, we wouldn't be expecting global population to stabilize mid-century at around nine to twelve billion people, among other things.

>post-scarcity is economically impossible to begin with

It might be if there would still be enough jobs for all the population, but what will happen when the automation hits hard?

>You want to be a doctor? Too bad, Watson is already the best doctor in the world and is currently controlling two hospitals at once with plans to expand to the UK.
>A transporter? Nice try, automatic vehicles are already a thing and people like Obama and the Democratic party already want to put all vehicles under machines
>A white collar worker? No comfy office for you user, machines already do a great chunk of the work in lots of works, including things like lawyers.
>But at least I can work with people! Hahah, nice one user, but Pepper has probably a better social-fu than you already.

When most than half of the population is unable to work, and the other part is only working because the State wants someone working, what use will money have?

That's just with simple robots. If we hit something like replicators and more advanced food producing robots, as well as improving a little bit our nuclear energy, providing won't be a problem. And yet, very people are going to have any use of 'earned' money, because they will simply unable to work, at all.

And I didn't even took into consideration Artificial Intelligence, because that's going to need some more real advancements before it can be viable. Although even taking the more conservative estimations, we will hit it in our life times.

Don't raise your kids the way your parents raised you, they were from a different generation.

Ironic thing is the source of that comment; the brother of Mohammad

What about a setting in which getting something from the world takes a certain amount of time, but takes exponentially longer to create freely from nothing?

Doesn't this already exist today in the form of computer software and media?

There has never been a post-scarcity society in real life so we have no idea how realistic any fictional ones are.

said computer software and media doesn't make me
>able to live to 400
>physically perfect
>have a drug gland where I can just make my own drugs
>spend my days lava-rafting or playing Azzad

This is the point of infinite leisure. People do what they want, simply because they want to. There is no doubt you would have people who do absolutely nothing and just linger around, growing fat and playing videogames cranked out by HAL 9001, and be happy. Then you'd have folks create, explore, or just think.

I'd want a space ship and some means to survive the journey from star to star and just explore the cosmos. Others would just go out into nature.

If all the means of survival are taken care of by automated machines, any medium of exchange would most likely fall back to the barter system, and purely for things people want that aren't made by machines. You can see it now where people will pay out the nose for "Hand made" stuff compared to the exact same, machine created object.

No user. This is the point of infinite exploitation. People who own the robots and the mean to power them will have infinite leisure, the people who lost their jobs to robots will have the scraps, if anything at all.

But if the robots make robots that make robots, all you need to do is give someone one robot and they're set.

Considering we already give away food and shelter to the poor, why would a philanthropist not just give away robots that cost literally nothing? It's not like poor people can make him rich any more anyway.

But they will user, they'll build you a cheap gray building, with a cheap bed, and a cheap robot serving you cheap food. See, they'd feel bad if you died, but, as long as you live, it's okay, you don't need to enjoy your time there.

In a post scarcity society, the cheap robot can fabricate better robots unless, for some reason , the practically infinite resources are all controlled by other entities. I don't see this as remaining viable indefinitely.

>the practically infinite resources are all controlled by other entities.
In which case you effectively are not in a post-scarcity situation.

My point is that that type of control is not something that can be maintained indefinitely, so it will be a post scarcity society.

This is both fascinating and terrifying. Why?

There is a couple of flaws here, though, first in that wants are an artificial over-layer of needs.

Needs are biologically fixed, and we are at a level now when everyone's needs could easily be satisfied many times over, if we weren't stuck in the lock groove of consumerist capitalism, where status is acquired through either endless accumulation of capital (for the capitalists), or display of surplus through conspicuous consumption (for wage slaves). That is to say that what you see as natural is a historically determined anomaly.

It is a result of the modern period collapse of historical societies, and again, is historically abnormal. If people have strong family ties, sexual partners, and social and economic security, their wants are met under any normal social conditions.

There are numerous studies showing, for instance, that excess wealth beyond the economically secure level does not increase self-reported happiness, and so on.

Second, wants do not need to be material. You can have all these stability preconditions met, and still have people who are maladapted, who, once you remove the monopoly token incentive to go into banking or the Congolese slave trade, would strive for status in any field it is attainable, i.e., maths, physics, artistic expressions, or just good old imperial style exploration, in order to have something named after them.

"I want it all and I want it now"
-Some fag with AIDs, the 80s

"Human Behavior flows from three main sources: Desire, Emotion, and Knowledge"
-Plato, 450 BC

The leech has two daughters. 'Give! Give!' they cry. "There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, 'Enough!'
-Proverbs 30:15, Probably around 500 BC

"Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, Nor are the eyes of man ever satisfied."
-Proverbs 27:20, Probably around 500 BC

“Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
-Tablet from Ancient Babylon circa 5000 BC

Human nature doesn't change. In nature, where we evolved, it was advantageous to always pursue MORE when you have enough already, because having enough now is no guarantee of having enough tomorrow. The instinct to gather more and more is biologically advantageous because it is the man who gathers twice as much as he needs who survives the famine.

It is hardwired into our DNA, things which we already have are taken for granted and new desires impose themselves as a sort of security against future crisis. It does not take extreme social engineering to cause people to desire more than what they have, quite to the contrary, it requires extreme social engineering to convince people of how good they have things already.

I agree with the original poster. A Post-Scarcity society is necessarily Post-Human.

I agree with you, and I liked your post...except for

>"I want it all and I want it now"
-Some fag with AIDs, the 80s

It is just a song BUUUT you had to bait. That's why we can't have nice things.

A post-scarcity society, or more accuratly something that resembles one from would simple be one where mankind basically lives a mix of welfare lechs and trustbabies through autismobucks because humans simple are not competitive enough in the economy.

Then what's to stop all of the people rendered unemployed to just make their own economy seperate from the automated one? The rich people don't need them anymore, and the robots aren't fulfilling their needs, so they can just go along like they always have serving each other.

>That's not a natural occurrence. It's the consequence of advertisement. Advertisement creates demand.

Advertisement creates more and different demands, but the Buddha proved that the mind is always dissatisfied.

I've always wondered if the US could go full BNW, because they just legalized marijuana in the state of Colorado and consumerist attitudes are pervasive in society. I wonder how it's working out for the countries where marijuana is fully legal.

Of course, before that happened, marijuana would have to be controlled by something in a position of power, like the government. But sometimes I wonder if I would work just for pot at the end of the week. I mean, I already do this, but instead of marijuana it's video games.

>The necessity to pass on your genes is a lie of the animal brain, not a necessity of the human mind.

Everything is a lie of the animal brain. Including the desire to remain alive.
Wanting children isn't 'logical' necessarily, but then neither is breathing.

>Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/

>Then what's to stop all of the people rendered unemployed to just make their own economy seperate from the automated one?
Lack of funds and tools.

>implying you're just going to leave them sitting there drinking Mountain Dew
>implying you're not going to start rewiring them into servitors of some kind
>implying some of them won't end up liking it

But isn't this what the Culture series does such a good job of exploring?

Let me ask this hypothetical question not based in science: if we put zero-point energy replicators (i.e. can construct anything without runnijg iut of material and power, and, hell, can construct it veey quickly, because fuck physics) n the hands of every human, how would this affect your analysis of human wants?

It seems to me that human needs would transition from material to experiential. And that's exactly what Banks explored in the Culture series. You have huge portions of the population self-drugging, or ascending to different levels of reality, or interfering with other cultures, or hell, comitting suicide. Isn't that directly in line with what you're saying?

How the shit does anyone provide anyone anything except by either wanting to for some kind of profit, of because someone forced you to? For you to eat unlimited food someone has to provide it.

>For you to eat unlimited food someone has to provide it.
Right now we are producing too much food and discarding of large quantities to keep the prices stable. And that's still not enough. Farmers are an endangered species. Soon, all we'll have is huge super-farms.

We don't actually need nearly as much human labor as people think. Our entire economic model is outdated. We cannot sell as much as we produce. Our productivity has been stagnant for a long time now, and we're headed into a major global economic crisis, because without growth, we're fucked. Without customers to buy our stuff, we're fucked. And there are no more customers. Infinite growth is impossible.

>ctrl+f "eldar"
>0 results

In the Grim Darkness Of the Future, Eldar had 4 Utopian Post Scarcity society.
Only one of them has collapsed, hail Slaneesh

But if you want all the cocks in your ass right now, getting AIDs is a very real possibility.

There are still things we only care about when humans do them. Like sport or artistry.
People will create niches to fit in, somehow they'll make the special butt painting be worth about as much as the infinite replicator that can satisfy all physical and emotional needs instantly.

>Like sport or artistry.
Not true.
There are already purely robotic sports, and computer-generated music is getting bigger and bigger.
Even if sports and arts were what's left for humans to earn money, you can't have such a pigeon-holed economy.

>post-scarcity technology is developed
>management class phases out human labour
>great unemployment
>more voters in favor of progressive taxing and society welfare
>generations come and go supported only by the state
>capital class enjoys a much higher standard of living than those without capital, even with the super-high tax rate
>people get employed for symbolic jobs just to buy their loyalty in political matters
>everybody ends up with a patron
>patrons abolish the state as we know it
>feudalism is back

>you can't have such a pigeon-holed economy
says you

Says I.

See, what I don't get about this argument is that part of it hinges on the future being much like the past—"human desires are limitless, so we'll always create more jobs"— and part of it hinges on things being radically different from the way they are now. Presently, the arts are winner-take-all markets with a very small number of winners and a huge number of losers; the reasons for this are, to the best of my knowledge, not entirely clear, but it's hypothesized that nobody wants to buy the novel that's almost as good as Harry Potter but not quite. In order for a future in which everyone WORKS as an artist to materialize, the market for art has to lose this winner-take-all character, and nothing suggests that it will.

In other words, the argument here is that the future will resemble the past because the things humans will want in the future will be radically different from the things they want now. The evidence supporting this argument isn't actually much better than the evidence supporting the argument that the future will be different from the past because automation will displace labor markets.

>it's hypothesized that nobody wants to buy the novel that's almost as good as Harry Potter but not quite.
I'm saying it's just brand recognition. Piracy is a good way to combat this tendency of "few winners, many losers", because piracy means you are aware of all the titles and can pick your personal favorite.

Wall-e

Not Star Trek, that's for damn sure.