[nucklepunche]

I am not neccessarily going to label myself a "technocrat" however I believe we will eventually evolve slowly toward technocracy. Unfortunately I think "post-scarcity economics" is a label that carries a lot of baggage, and the implication is that it is utopian and that there will literally be an unlimited amount of everything for everybody, regardless of what it is. That being said my understanding is not that resources will be unlimited, but that the resources necessary for everybody to have a reasonably high quality of life will be available for little cost and effort.

I do believe we will evolve naturally into a more technocratic system. The age of plenty that was long predicted is at the doorstep in some sense. 3D printers are only going to get bigger and better, and lower the cost of production radically. If 3D printers can simply print other 3D printers, there is no need for human labor. I do believe that meaningful human labor is essentially over. Most jobs in the future will mainly be non-productive, such as entertainment or art, or otherwise people will have no job. In a sense it is scary and hopeful at the same time, but we must fundamentally shift the economic paradigm from the 40 hour work week.

I believe there will be a natural redistribution of wealth through the cheapening of the means of production to such a level that anybody can reasonably control them. Many people on the left criticize falling wages and people on both sides criticize high unemployment, but perhaps the answer is not to worry about these things and instead to worry about making the necessities of life so radically cheap that people do not need as much money to afford them. If we can have 3D printers eventually print houses, and print the 3D printers that print the houses, there may be no need to worry about high rents ever again.

I believe that this natural evolution is not without its pitfalls. I believe that the powers that be will try to engage in a last ditch attempt to retain their power via the cloak of intellectual property. I view this as the single greatest threat slowing down technological progress, ultimately they will lose, but they will try to use it to stop the movement toward greater replication of resources, since taking the means of production out of their hands lessens their control over the resource of labor.

In the long run, as scarcity subsides, so will political differences regarding economic issues. The primary root of most political ideologies has always been economic interests, most ideological claptrap that goes along with it has fundamentally been a justification for economic interests. In the end politics in the traditional sense will simply fade away. While I am not sure technocracy will look anything like the movement of the 1930s intended it to be, we are truly at a major step in human civilization's political and economic development, one we have not seen since the Enlightenment birthed the concept of political ideology altogether. In the end this new world will have its birth pains, but I believe sooner or later we will arrive, oddly enough, at the world Marx envisioned (in the great long run). What Marx was wrong about was that class conflict would bring it about, instead a natural evolution would occur. Of course Marx could not envision the concept of technology which can replicate itself, and if he had who knows if his conclusions would have been different.

I know 3D printing is new, but I see it as one of several technologies that will change society more radically than the Internet ever did.

[quetzalcoatl]

FARTS.

Current automation systems are intensely capital intensive. They require armies of mega-million dollar robots, programmers, engineers, and technicians. This constitutes a natural bottleneck in production; the elites who control these systems are able to down regulate production levels as required to maintain an artificial level of scarcity. Thus we have FARTS (forced artificial scarcity).

Over time, some evolution of molecular engineering may break the stranglehold of capital on automation, but this is not guaranteed.

A more immediate concern is the resource crunch triggered by providing a minimal level of goods and services to a peaking planetary population bubble. Again, this may work itself out over time - but the results may not favor a technocratic system.

[Husky]

I'm excited to see the rise of quantum technology and the potential benefits.

Picture a tiny bit of a thing on an already miniscule computer chip. Something microscopic with the power to think like a computer without the need of complex circuitry and capable of being moved by light or sound: That is quantum technology simplified.

Put less simply, quantum control uses a technology derived from physics for computer applications. Quantum electrodynamics, or QED, describes the interaction of matter and light, and QED-circuits take this interaction to the computer chip by trying to harness the interaction for circuitry in machines. Phonons are sound-activated quantum vibrations that move circuitry and motor machines at the chip level. All of these breakthroughs in quantum technology are merging science and technology into something that isn't mere experimentation, but has enormous implications because they work and may someday power the computer and communication devices we use every day. Their enormity comes in their tiny, atomic-sized power.

Then there's nanotechnology.

How is this impacting technology and the future? In just about every field, nanotechnology is being used for innovations in engineering, medical devices, imaging, computing and many more. Nanomedicine is one area experiencing rapid and dramatic growth. Because many illnesses and disorders in the body take place at the cellular level and grow as ruled by the formation of genetic makeup, nanotechnology has the capability to treat at the very root of the condition, rather than after it's fully spread throughout the body. It can be both preventative and curative because treatment reaches the narrowest and most minuscule centers of control. Neurosurgery and gene therapy are just two areas within nanomed that are particularly well-suited for nanotools and technology.

Surely these technologies will make the task of technocracy even easier. A technate run with advanced technologies, making energy accounting easy and the production of high quality goods hassle free. This utopia is becoming a reality.

[nucklepunche]

Current automation systems are intensely capital intensive. They require armies of mega-million dollar robots, programmers, engineers, and technicians. This constitutes a natural bottleneck in production; the elites who control these systems are able to down regulate production levels as required to maintain an artificial level of scarcity. Thus we have FARTS (forced artificial scarcity).

You are thinking on the levels of automotive factories. 3D printers for printing small objects cost around $800 at the cheapest, and will only get cheaper. I remember the first PC computer my family had back in the late 90s was well over 1000 dollars and was relatively shoddy, now my latest desktop I got brand new for under half that price, and my laptop was maybe 400. If you figure computing power doubles every two years my current desktop (which I bought in 2011) is 6X as powerful for less than 1/2 the price.

Originally computers were confined to the super-computers with mainframes. Cell phones were once so expensive that people would purchase fake car phones in the 1980s to make themselves seem rich, yet these phones were blocky and inconvenient. Now I can buy a pre-paid phone for $20.

Sooner or later these technologies will get cheaper, and more portable. No matter how much the elites try to draw down production they will not be able to do so. If we can get the cost of a printer large enough to print the largest components of an automobile to $100,000 dollars it may seem like a lot of money, but it is radically cheaper than what it costs to build an auto plant today, where the equipment costs millions. I think it is reasonable that cheap automobiles with 3d printed parts costing less than $5000 will be widely available within 20 years. In a sense we will be reverting back to the old days where people did it out of their garage, as Henry Ford did.

I am not a techno-logical utopian. I don't think technology will automatically solve our problems. I also believe that a lot of technologies are a lot further off than thought. Some predict singularity within 50 years, whereas I think this is akin to those who foresaw us traveling through the stars by 2000 in the 1950s. The truth is intelligence is very complex, it might happen someday, but will be centuries. I tend to think that high speed practical space travel to travel between star systems is more or less a practical impossibility. I believe intelligent aliens are exceedingly rare if they exist at all, the conditions have to be just right and everything has to come together perfectly. Even if they exist, I do not think we will ever practically meet them. I am also skeptical of claims of biological immortality being right around the corner. I do think we will reasonably expect to see a lot of people living to 120 or beyond in the next century, but the possibility of people being essentially immortal is very, very far off.

These things being said I believe we can reasonably expect to live in a world where scarcity in terms of living to modern standards is essentially eliminated, and a new economic system replaces traditional capitalism. It will not be traditional socialism, but will look more similar to distributism or market socialism. I think governments will eventually lose control of any practical way of regulating IP, and intellectual property will essentially be de fact sociaized. I also believe that a global electronic currency will develop apart from the state. There still will be private property, however the means of production will be radically redistributed into the hands of individuals and small groups. Automation will eliminate traditional 40 hour wage work, and products will be cheap enough for most people to reasonably afford. People will work 20 hours a week or less on average within the next 50 years, and the public demand for some sort of basic income guarantee will grow so great that it will be implimented in most communities.

In the future government will be paradoxically both more global, and more local at the same time, and the traditional nation-state will become less important, they will exist but essentially in name only, heads of state and national governments will be figureheads. There will be a global monetary system of electronic currency, but most social services will have to be handled at the local level, including the basic income. Small regional governments will be able to enact progressive policies at will since industry will be sufficiently distributed enough that the incentive to race to the bottom will be removed, however these policies will be maintained by significantly lower taxation due to technological advances.

The only thing standing in the way of this future will be capitalist interests resorting to increasingly tyrannical methods to try to prevent dessimation of IP and new technology to a lower level. In essence the whole capitalist argument, however, has been that they are consistent with the principles of freedom. It will be difficult for them to maintain their power with tyranny because they have based their entire premise on libertarian rhetoric. This could not be maintained without a central state and a cult of personality around an individual or patriotic fervor to maintain it, but modern times makes informational channels more evenly spread out and national borders less relevent, making it too difficult to set up such a state apparatus. The only thing that can save traditional capitalism is outright restriction of technology requiring mass control by a centralized, quasi-international state. I believe at this point security is the only thing they can use to justify such an apparatus. Barring this the future form of human governance will be a form of technocratic libertarian market socialism.

These things being said, I must reassert my lack of faith in utopia. While I believe these technlogies are revolutionary, I believe we will reach a technological plateau or a radical slowing down of technology relatively soon in the future. This plateau will not mean an end to technological progress, but progress will slow significantly. Essentially we will need some major breakthrough that hs not been foreseen yet. Essentially any new breakthrough will require breaking beyond certain laws of biology or physics, and this will only come with years of slow progress on these fronts. I do think a hyper-advanced civilization will occur, and I expect life at the end of the 21st century to look different than it did at the start, as was the case with the 20th and 19th. However I don't expect the 22nd century to look that different. In the same way life really didn't change much from say 1500 to 1600, there was slow progress in technology but it was not rapid breakthroughs. The harnessing of energy in the industrial revolution changed that, and the transistor moved us a further step ahead. That being said, we will hit a wall with the laws of physics and biology, and it will take a long time to breach, if it can be breached at all.

[Full Spectrum]

I also believe that a global electronic currency will develop apart from the state.

Sorry, but i have to ask if you have heard about bitcoin before? Is this similar to your view or totally wrong?
If not could you state what such a global currency would be like?

[mikema63]

If you started making automation ubiquitous and available to all you could start seeing currency fall apart altogether.

You could just make anything you wanted, including more 3d printers and robots that do resource extraction for you, what would you need exchange for? Your going to eliminate such large swaths of exchange that if currency even still existed it would be for intellectual property or other special circumstances.

[Ummon]

I don't believe this is true, although I hope you end up being correct. I believe that all the technologies you stated are quite dangerous and because of that danger there will be a push by the majority for regulation of them. There will not be enough enforcers for this, so various troublemakers will begin using these technologies in nefarious ways to increase their own standing at the cost of the whole. This will put us at existential risk as a species. There is no way to physically remove this risk entirely.

[Pants-of-dog]

There is also the whole ecological side of things.

While I agree with most of this, I do think that having a flying car in every garage (which is actually a 3D printer!!) will cause pollution problems, destruction of natural habitats and all sorts of other ecological woes.

And unless every 3D printer comes with a functional ecological consciousness, you are going to need some way of stopping people from making decisions that are bad on an ecological level.

[quetzalcoatl]

There is also the whole ecological side of things.

While I agree with most of this, I do think that having a flying car in every garage (which is actually a 3D printer!!) will cause pollution problems, destruction of natural habitats and all sorts of other ecological woes.

And unless every 3D printer comes with a functional ecological consciousness, you are going to need some way of stopping people from making decisions that are bad on an ecological level.

The long-term solution to our ecological excess is to put a major reversal on human population levels. A post-scarcity environment would make this more achievable. After population has been stabilized at a more ecologically sane level, molecular engineering could be used to deconstruct most of the now useless human infrastructure into bio-digestible components.

[Pants-of-dog]

let me get this straight.

First we develop the tech.

Then we distribute it so that everyone can literally own the means of production.

Everyone gets to live as well as a First Worlder.

Then population levels magically drop.

Then we develop nanotech that eats all the useless stuff and makes our world somehow sustainable.

So, during the time population levels are dropping, everybody can have as many cars as they want. Or iCrap or whatever. And during this time, we would simply continue to pollute as before but now with 7 billion people doing it instead of just the developed world.

[Harmattan]

First we develop the tech.

Then we distribute it so that everyone can literally own the means of production.

This is already the case for a long time for some of us: in my field the production means are a computer and softwares, and the capital is only needed to hire other people (there are other needs such as advertisement and juridical counsel but they are affordable for a mere individual). And yet many people will never create their own enterprise, because of laziness, risk aversion, disinterest or because they are currently happy with their job. And this will never change however you distribute production means and communizes the society.

The important part about technocracy is not the generalization of the means of production. It is about the generalization of a mechanized and autonomous workforce able to replace humans in every activity. It's more about giving slaves to everyone. And this is an ongoing trend for more than one century.

[quetzalcoatl]

let me get this straight.

First we develop the tech.

Then we distribute it so that everyone can literally own the means of production.

Everyone gets to live as well as a First Worlder.

Then population levels magically drop.

Then we develop nanotech that eats all the useless stuff and makes our world somehow sustainable.

So, during the time population levels are dropping, everybody can have as many cars as they want. Or iCrap or whatever. And during this time, we would simply continue to pollute as before but now with 7 billion people doing it instead of just the developed world.

Well, you're right of course.

We are already seeing a serious disintegration of the infrastructure that supports current population levels. A collapse to 1900 levels by century's end is not unrealistic, depending on the magnitude of the overshoot correction.

There is some distant reason for hope, if post-crash population levels can be stabilized. The massive support structure that enables personal and goods transportation are obviated by the existence of dispersed molecular manufacturing.

There is nothing that guarantees any of this will be the actual outcome - there is nothing stopping us from being as stupid as we choose to be.

[Ummon]

Pants-of-dog where do you plan on getting the raw materials? Space? Nuclear fusion? Genetic manipulation of microbes to synthesize gasoline? Seems unlikely to me to happen in the time necessary for technocracy to be viable in this lifetime. Perhaps I am wrong.

[mikema63]

All of those technologies are being worked on now iter will be fully working in 2027, yeast strains that produce diesel already exist, and space mining operations are already planned and in development.

[Decky]

We would be a lot better off if we just got rid of technology, a lot of the illnesses "cured" by modern medicne are caused my modern lifestyles anyway.

[mikema63]

We would be a lot better off if we just got rid of technology,

Non-believers shall be burned at the stake.

[quetzalcoatl]

We would be a lot better off if we just got rid of technology, a lot of the illnesses "cured" by modern medicne are caused my modern lifestyles anyway.

You're going to have to sacrifice most of the existing world population, depending on just how far you want to go with getting rid of technology.

[The Clockwork Rat]

depending on just how far you want to go with getting rid of technology.

Doesn't work, unfortunately, because so much of it is intertwined.

[quetzalcoatl]

Information technology, in particular, but really all tech creates dependencies that cannot easily be unwound. It would be a total nightmare, for instance, having humans manually handle the information flow of modern financial infrastructure - bottlenecks would be created that would catastrophically crash the system. Similar ratcheting effects could affect countless other embedded structures.

[The Clockwork Rat]

Even things like a scientific understanding of agriculture and the "natural" environment that are undoubtedly useful but that might initially appear to be safe from a widespread demolition of technology would depend on telecommunications and the ability to process large quantities of data. It'll be harder to tread backwards than to collapse forwards.