Is faith in ideology less blind, fanatical and dangerous than relgious

[TimG]

"What will people do for jobs in the future?"

100 years ago 90% of the people worked producing food because there was no other choice. Food was expensive and took a large part of household budgets (see http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/1900%201950%202003.png)

Technology changed that picture. As the cost of food came down there was money to pay for luxuries like mass produced 'Christmas Ornaments' which in turn creates employment in mass production. The same trend has happened with manufactured goods which are now cheaper than they ever have been which frees up money to pay for services/virtual goods which creates employment.

The evolution is a repetition of what happened in the past - not something new.

[Michael Hardner]

The evolution is a repetition of what happened in the past - not something new.

Agreed. Making digital pictures sounds like a better pursuit to me than a lot of things....

[eyeball]

We had a lot of plastic garbage by the 1970s... the less of that stuff we have the better. What's better for your standard of living than unemploy.... er... I mean free time ?

The absence of someone constantly breathing down your neck to produce a capital gain for them.

How do you see our economy functioning without that?

[Moonlight Graham]

"screwed over" is a subjective judgement that is based on perceptions rather than fact. A lot of privileged people think they are "screwed over" even though they have no objective basis for complaint. This makes it a meaningless criteria The question of having adequate food and shelter is an objective measure.

Virtually all economic gains going to a small % of the most wealthy over the last 35 years since neoliberal reforms kicked in is an objective measure. Wealthy people getting taxed very high rates and feeling like they're screwed over is based on objective measures Again, like I said, economic ideology is usually about who should get what, and this is subjective of course. You can have overall excellent economic growth but either high or low income inequality. ie: the US and Switzerland have about equal GDP per capita, but the US has the highest income inequality among developed countries but Switzerland much less. Ethiopia is high on income equality but has terrible GDP per capita (among many other examples), so there obviously isn't a strong correlation between economic strength and equality.

Now, blind faith in economic ideology, like a strongly regulated economy is always best vs lassez-faire open-market economy is always best, is also short-sighted. It's been shown that what will work depends on a particular country's context. For instance, widely open markets often works in developed countries but often has led to disaster in numerous developing countries. Mixed economies of capitalism with strong state intervention has led to much success in Asian countries like China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea etc, but each state has to adjust its market regulation based on its own context (it's resources, industries, geography etc). There's no single perfect economic model that will work on all countries, so blind faith in any economic ideology is harmful and short-sighted. And most every model can be adjusted even still to benefit certain income groups over others.

Edited December 17, 2015 by Moonlight Graham

[Michael Hardner]

How do you see our economy functioning without that?

We ban money and create a centralized wellness management app. Economic theories break down, I think, when there's a lack of scarcity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

[TimG]

Virtually all economic gains going to a small % of the most wealthy over the last 35 years since neoliberal reforms kicked in is an objective measure.

Depends on how you measure the gains. This chart shows that the middle class is shrinking but the proportion of wealthy people is increasing: https://d1jn4vzj53eli5.cloudfront.net/mc/_external/2015_12/um-isnt-this-good-news.png?h=509&w=310

You can have overall excellent economic growth but either high or low income inequality.

Do We Care About Income Inequality, or Absolute Well-Being?

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2015/10/do-we-care-about-income-inequality-or-absolute-well-being-2.html

In my opinion income inequality is a red herring. The issue is what level of services are available to people with less income. The reason why quality of life in Europe may be better for the poor is they have access to services which the poor in the US do not even though the stats say the poor in the US are richer in terms of disposable income than those of Europe. That said, structural unemployment is much higher in Europe so the short term benefit of access to services comes at a cost.

Edited December 17, 2015 by TimG

[Moonlight Graham]

To be fair, even in this system, the majority can only vote for the options placed before them and hope for the best.

If the majority of voters strongly wanted policy X, you'd see it implemented fairly quickly by one of the parties. If Canadians strongly wanted all highways painted purple, and this was one of the strongest election issues from voters that would decide their vote, our highways would be painted purple in a short period of time. Look how quickly all the parties jumped at introducing promises to bring in more Syrian refugees during the last election after the picture of the dead boy, when there was virtually no talk of it beforehand.

[eyeball]

We ban money and create a centralized wellness management app. Economic theories break down, I think, when there's a lack of scarcity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

I think its our religiously inspired beliefs and theories about laziness and idle hands that cause most of the problems.

If there really is that much faith in these sorts of labour eliminating technologies coming on stream we should be able to borrow against the day they arrive and take a lot of social pressure and angst off ourselves now. Is squeezing everyone and everything for the last few drops of productivity gains really helping going to get us there any faster?

Is the Technological Singularity really just pie-in-the-sky or do we possess the courage of our convictions that something like a TS it is real and that we'll reach it in time - in other words do we have faith in ourselves? If we did we could mortgage and bank on real tangible things like the platinum asteroids and other wealth we know is scattered throughout the solar system. It seems strange that as we approach a physical ecological bottleneck of scarcity we do so with the apparent faith and conviction that technology will allow us bypass the bottleneck safely. This conviction is strongest amongst people who try to dismiss fears that we're heading for oblivion and propose hitting the gas pedal on our economy. Ironically the moral imperative to produce also runs strongest in these folks. So what do we do about that?

I say we borrow against their conviction. How? By banking on pie-in-the-sky of course. Pies made of platinum asteroids and maybe even gold...all it takes is a little something we have in great abundance, their faith.

What should we do with all the money we borrow? Provide everyone a guaranteed annual income. Why? To address the moral imperative problem mostly. Finland just did. It makes a lot of sense to me that in a world where employment is becoming scarcer that we should give everyone an income so what employment there is can be shared. It seems to me that reducing the burden of the unemployed while relieving the stress of the overworked would be a good thing. Then we could concentrate on reaching that TS.

Edited December 17, 2015 by eyeball

[Moonlight Graham]

If the world is finite then this is inevitable. OTOH, as the virtual economy expands the share of the economy dedicated to producing real goods would decline as would the share of people who need to work in producing real goods. We already see this trend happening today. How many people are employed producing food in Canada today vs 100 years ago?

Well let's compare something more recent, like the 1970's compared to now. Or 2000 (post-internet) to now. Obviously virtual goods are still increasingly. And goods that were once physical or at least distributed as physical (CD's, video games, movies, publishing - books, magazines etc.) are now increasingly distributed virtually. There still needs to be a physical medium to consume these virtual goods (cellphone, TV) and physical people working in physical offices etc. to produce these goods and the medium, but the physical burden is still less overall.

Physical needs will still be needed though - food, shelter etc. But imagine a world where everything but food and shelter were provided virtually at very low cost (the only cost being maintaining the virtual system that produces virtual goods). Imagine most people living in a virtual world like the Matrix, and anything they did was virtual. Want to play the guitar? Walk in the virtual world to the virtual store and buy a virtual guitar with virtual money to strum with your virtual hand and other virtual people around to enjoy it. Virtual goods are essentially infinite and have zero cost beyond designing the initial system to produce them (and there's already virtual worlds where the users design their own items for all to use), so everyone could live in a massive mansion on a giant ranch with an amusement park in their backyards for essentially zero cost and zero maintenance and zero physical goods. All that would be needed is to stay connected in the virtual Matrix world, with tubes feeding your real body nutrients and possibly automated exercise machines on you to prevent muscular atrophy while you're in the virtual world. The cost of this to each person would be low, only the money for food and very small shelter and access to the virtual world system.

The temptation to stay virtually connected and embark on epic adventures in virtual fantasy worlds with any luxuries at your disposal would be very tempting compared to living in the real world. People could create any virtual reality they wanted, could create their own country with its own laws etc. War could end because any needs besides basic food and shelter (which would be no bigger than a coffin-sized box if constantly connected the to virtual world) could be enjoyed within the Matrix world. War is not needed when all goods and resources are virtual and infinite and free in a virtual reality, and all land is infinite of course too. Until singularity, there would be some people needed on the outside physical world to do tasks that couldn't be automated, but as always it would probably be done by the poorest and least powerful.

Edited December 17, 2015 by Moonlight Graham

[TimG]

The temptation to stay virtually connected and embark on epic adventures in virtual fantasy worlds with any luxuries at your disposal would be very tempting compared to living in the real world. Until singularity, there would be some people needed on the outside physical world to do tasks that couldn't be automated, but as always it would probably be done by the poorest.

Who says they would be the poorest? Farmers in North America have to be technically and adaptable entrepreneurs. The people keeping the machines running have to have technical savvy. More importantly, this virtual world needs content that is created by humans and there is no reason to believe that computers will ever replace humans when it comes to creating original content.

[Moonlight Graham]

Who says they would be the poorest? Farmers in North America have to be technically and adaptable entrepreneurs. The people keeping the machines running have to have technical savvy. More importantly, this virtual world needs content that is created by humans and there is no reason to believe that computers will ever replace humans when it comes to creating original content.

Well, the content could be created by the users within the virtual world. Lots of examples of that, like looking at mods for games like Skyrim, or everything users create in Minecraft. I say the poorest because I'd predict people would rather live in a virtual world where all their dreams can come true rather than being a farmer or fixing broken computer systems.

[TimG]

Well, the content could be created by the users within the virtual world. Lots of examples of that, like looking at mods for games like Skyrim, or everything users create in Minecraft.

Minecraft and Skyrim are virtual goods sold for a profit.

I say the poorest because I'd predict people would rather live in a virtual world where all their dreams can come true rather than being a farmer or fixing broken computer systems.

Most people today can balance the need to work with leisure time. The question is what kind of paid work will they be doing. I don't personally know - I simply think it is likely that same process that has happened in the past will repeat and that new jobs and business models will emerge. Also the need to produce physical goods will become a smaller part of the economy although it can never go away entirely. Edited December 17, 2015 by TimG

[Scott Mayers]

To the OP,

I agree that religion isn't the sole (or soul?) cause of problems directly. You mentioned ideology though in a separate distinction as if all ideology has something in common to which only some religions do. The reverse is more the case because religion is merely one form of ideology. If we define "ideology" to mean any system of practice based on some idealized goal which is believed to work, and restrict this to politics alone, it would more appropriately be best to interpret the problem in all ideology (including religion) as having the property of MORALITY encompassed in the laws it uses to justify being enforced AND that to any such political ideology, they all deal with a common goal to determine how to make people ECONOMICALLY FAIR. Of course, in the last factor, "fairness" is also an intrinsic factor of morality.

So the reason religion is often an undercurrent tied into politics in one way or the other is because the remote nature of a God who equally represents ones' interpretation of Nature itself commanding which things are right or not, means that even non-religious ideologies the have some form of faith in even some natural absolute that commands which things are 'right' versus which things are 'wrong' is the key here. Communism may be atheistic in that they don't always appeal to traditional theistic beings. But without realizing it, Communism itself is more often not actually practiced (nor be able to) because it proposes a faith in a future and its progeny with equivalent question. For instance, how could you assert concern for a generation of children in some future of which you cannot participate in personally. If you are sincerely absent of religion, it is not any more insignificant whether a comet comes by the moment you die than to have even the best of paradise in some future which you cannot ever possibly be a real part of?

So religion or the key foundations of it are what underlies all political ideologies that have the most potential to cause problems. This is because, the component of religion that justifies one's politics, whether apparently beneficial or not, resides in something lacking evidence to nature requiring any amount of fairness or moral concern.

It may also be equally troublesome should one simply rule without any belief in a religion if one is sufficiently powerful to get what they command politically no matter what. For instance, if one had discovered a super bomb that could effectively destroy the whole world with a simple thought, such a person would not even have any concern to bother questioning whether there is or is not a god nor whether they are being 'fair' or not. In fact, in this way, they BECOME a god in their own right. (Reminds me of "Rap God" by Eminem where he poses the unspoken presumption by others that he thinks he's some kind of delusional King. He answers this throughout but ends on, "Why be(come) a king, when you can be a god?" [Drops mic.])

Politics are actually all about ones' capacity to FORCE others to comply by those empowered to do so. And it DOES begin with differences of economy. Basically, economy is simply survival when one is suffering or being prevented from getting what they want (including needs) to some degree. But where such power is never perfectly absolute, one's capacity to justify it acts as a type of force that is or can be highly effective. Even if you happen to be the most powerful being AND know that you have no more significant superiority to justify command beyond your own selfish whims, it would get lonely on your throne if you also depend on others to at least provide some of your wants in a way that is most appealing. I am confident that if we could all BE gods in some way and live as long as we desired, we would run the full gambit from supremely compassionate to utter violation of others if only to merely entertain ourselves once we got bored of behaving one way or the other for too long. And then, I also believe that if we could live long enough whether eternally in some heaven or hell, we'd come to a point where we'd only wish for death in a most permanent way for ourselves rather than be utterly exhausted of boredom from doing it all OR from evading potential torment in any way.

So does this change how you think about whether religion is or is not a functional cause of harm on others? Certainly, if you perceive one or another as beneficial, it is more about perception than anything. I agree that if one is driven with an incentive to be most altruistic and kind, religion often takes a large role in this way too. But where a religious person may ACT out of duty or reward for their behavior, non-religious persons may still be this way but do it without delusion that they are doing for some incentive. If there is some discrepancy between facts of those who actually DO behave more altruistically via religion or not, if the absence of good nature is severely lacking in the non-religious, this is sufficient proof that we are intrinsically hopeless to interpret good acts regardless. It would also prove that for those potential majority of do gooders who ARE religious, are just as likely doing it for severe selfish drives (to be rewarded in heaven, etc).

[dre]

I don't actually think that religion is a root cause for most of whats going on. If you look deep enough you'll see that most conflicts boil down to more tangible issues like competition over land and resources, or the desire for political self determination, nationalism, the desire for power, ambition, etc.

Religion IS problematic though because conditions people to accept what others say without question, and without critical thinking.

But atheists can and have fought over all these things too, and interestingly enough its western countries and countries like Russia where secularism is embraced that have been racking some of the biggest death tolls. National armies controlled by corrupt politicians.

Edited December 18, 2015 by dre

[Moonlight Graham]

Minecraft and Skyrim are virtual goods sold for a profit.

Yes, but once you initially buy that product it's a virtual world system where you can build, create, do infinite things within it for free thereafter. Soon the masses will be able to play Minecraft on Oculus Rift VR goggles, so we're getting closer.

[Bonam]

Is the Technological Singularity really just pie-in-the-sky or do we possess the courage of our convictions that something like a TS it is real and that we'll reach it in time - in other words do we have faith in ourselves? If we did we could mortgage and bank on real tangible things like the platinum asteroids and other wealth we know is scattered throughout the solar system. It seems strange that as we approach a physical ecological bottleneck of scarcity we do so with the apparent faith and conviction that technology will allow us bypass the bottleneck safely. This conviction is strongest amongst people who try to dismiss fears that we're heading for oblivion and propose hitting the gas pedal on our economy. Ironically the moral imperative to produce also runs strongest in these folks. So what do we do about that?

I say we borrow against their conviction. How? By banking on pie-in-the-sky of course. Pies made of platinum asteroids and maybe even gold...all it takes is a little something we have in great abundance, their faith.

There are companies doing just that... selling the promise of mining asteroids to investors, and using that money to pay their employees to work towards that goal. Unfortunately for you, you don't get a piece of that "pie" unless you are working on it or investing in it. Not until these companies succeed and start making profits and paying taxes, anyway.

New technologies don't just magically appear, they are developed because lots of smart people put in lots of effort to develop them, and because people with lots of money see fit to invest in them because they expect a return.

[TimG]

Yes, but once you initially buy that product it's a virtual world system where you can build, create, do infinite things within it for free thereafter.

Until someone comes up with something new that grabs the zeitgeist. User created content always builds on platforms created by people who are paid to create them. This will continue into the future.

[eyeball]

There are companies doing just that... selling the promise of mining asteroids to investors, and using that money to pay their employees to work towards that goal. Unfortunately for you, you don't get a piece of that "pie" unless you are working on it or investing in it. Not until these companies succeed and start making profits and paying taxes, anyway.

New technologies don't just magically appear, they are developed because lots of smart people put in lots of effort to develop them, and because people with lots of money see fit to invest in them because they expect a return.

Keep up the good work.

There are other people with expectations of a return investing in other things and in ways that are leaving millions upon millions of other human beings with less and less on a planet whose capacity to produce enough for everyone is coming up against real limits of sustainability.

Unfortunately you're in a race against time and I'm suggesting we may have little choice but to start borrowing against the benefits of that pie sooner rather than later to make it over the last hump. Please hurry up and do a good job. The last thing your industry or anyone needs now is an interregnum that couldn't be avoided because human beings decided to get all pissy over basing everything on real banks with real dollars based on real stuff in hand - that's clearly a pirate's ship that sailed decades ago and whose plunder is probably the source of much of the 'wealth' being invested in your efforts.

[kimmy]

When I used to watch Star Trek: Next Generation, I always thought that the most unrealistic element wasn't that humans in the future might develop a technology that could satisfy everyone's material needs, but rather that such technology if it existed would be shared universally among people.

-k

[eyeball]

When I used to watch Star Trek: Next Generation, I always thought that the most unrealistic element wasn't that humans in the future might develop a technology that could satisfy everyone's material needs, but rather that such technology if it existed would be shared universally among people.

-k

That's about the last thing I would expect to go through a kid's head. I always imagined being the captain of a ship and hollering orders at everyone, and that's what I do now.

It was only when I became an adult that I was struck by how incongruous a replicator that produces food and other useful things for virtually nothing would be in our world.

Don't get me wrong I was a good little capitalist when I was a kid, I had a big downtown Toronto newspaper route and a good number of the people I delivered to had me rake their leaves and shovel their snow. I made money hand over fist.

Edited December 19, 2015 by eyeball

[Bonam]

When I used to watch Star Trek: Next Generation, I always thought that the most unrealistic element wasn't that humans in the future might develop a technology that could satisfy everyone's material needs, but rather that such technology if it existed would be shared universally among people.

-k

I always found the most unrealistic element to be that religion would be essentially non-existent among humankind. If only.

As for replicators... they were only there to produce relatively small items, not shelter and such so definitely not satisfying all material needs. And they required the energy output of antimatter or fusion reactors to power them. And they were hardly available everywhere. Just in the centers, outposts, and spacecraft of affluent civilizations... like Earth. The same is true today, food is plentiful in the cities of affluent nations like Canada.

[Bonam]

That's about the last thing I would expect to go through a kid's head. I always imagined being the captain of a ship and hollering orders at everyone, and that's what I do now.

It was only when I became an adult that I was struck by how incongruous a replicator that produces food and other useful things for virtually nothing would be in our world.

Don't get me wrong I was a good little capitalist when I was a kid, I had a big downtown Toronto newspaper route and a good number of the people I delivered to had me rake their leaves and shovel their snow. I made money hand over fist.

The amount of labor needed to produce food has been steadily declining for centuries. The replicator is only the natural extension of that.

Of course, given the reaction to GMOs, if we did have a real life replicator we'd have environmentalists condemning it as the work of evil corporations, insisting that the food they eat be replicator-free, and campaigning against having replicators deployed in developing nations where they could save millions from malnutrition and starvation. And of course we'd have powerful lobby groups blocking the use of replicators since it would cost farmers jobs.

Edited December 19, 2015 by Bonam

[eyeball]

Recall Dr McCoy always condemning transporters. You'll never please everyone even at stardate 1312.4.

[Scott Mayers]

I ask why were they even trekking in the first place? I admire the science and search along with the imagination and drama of going to other places, but realistically, who would waste the energy even to run a ship which would technically have better efficiency staying in one place and using that energy instead to fire up the old holodeck?

[eyeball]

I ask why were they even trekking in the first place?

Because it's in our nature to do so. Human beings have learned that trekking pays off and put a lot of faith in it.