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Originally Posted by Bootstrap Bill
Okay, after viewing the videos and reading the literature, here are some of my preliminary thoughts.
1. The whole concept needs to be updated. It doesn't take Nanotechnology into account. The assembler if/when it is developed could do everything the RBE can do and more, in the comfort of your own home, making household products, food and more out of your own recycled waste and using free solar power.
2. The cities themselves need to be updated as well. If we have Nanotechnology we could use Utility Fog to build them and rebuild them daily if we wanted to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog - scroll down to the external links. Neat stuff.
3. Some things will always be scarce and valuable.
a: Antiques
b: Precious metals and gems
c: Hand made products - fine furniture, crafts, clothing.... things that take lots of labor to produce. Many people prefer handcrafted merchandise over mass produced junk and are willing to pay for it.
d: Meals created by well known chefs
e: Good seats at sporting events, concerts, Broadway musicals, etc.
If there is no money, how will these items and services be distributed? Why would someone spend lots of time producing something if there was no personal gain?
4. People are greedy. People are selfish. People are LAZY. If items are free, they will take all they can and more. Don't bother washing your clothes, throw them out and order a new set. Don't worry about leaving that laptop computer out in the rain, you can get a new one free anytime you want.
Will the system place limits on what people can request? That leaves open the possibilities of a black market - people will steal instead of waiting for their turn to get a particular item. This could also cause the creation of an underground currency.
If the RBE is to become a reality, it will have to coexist with some kind of cash system - the basics might be free, but the extras will have to be earned somehow.
5. The cities all look like the same post-modern style. Not everyone is into that. There needs to be more variety.
6. Do they really expect us to bulldoze our cities and start over? What about our history? What about our famous landmarks? Should we forget they exist?
7. If people no longer have to work, many of them will simply become couch potatoes. Go rent the movie Idiocracy. Sure a few of them will do productive things, but the average person will vegetate and accomplish NOTHING useful.
They have a lot of neat ideas, but the whole concept needs a lot of work. |
1. Nanotechnology has already been taken into account in part 2 of this presentation:
• Video Link• Video Link
Other than that I am more than aware of the vast implications that nanotechnology will have on society in the future.
However, TVP is mostly concerned with the technologies we can make use of TODAY, not fanciful future tech that has yet to exist. If these future tech can be developed and readily applicable today (and has passed through all health&safety tests/procedures), then great (that's why nuclear fusion was not mentioned in Zeitgeist Addendum, but Geothermal and Evacuated Tube Transport Technology was).
3. Cultural values must shift to the allocation of resources towards priority objectives. In this system we value the collection of useless junk, but that can be changed. Resource scarcity can be eliminated with more intelligent application of technology i.e. mining on asteroids, underneath the Earth's crust, higher recycling efficiency, etc.
4. People's behaviors such as greed, and laziness have a root cause, and it is mostly influenced by the environment interacting with their genes
There is no such thing as "human nature" in the sense of a static, fixed, unchanging, predetermined set of behaviors, it is
HUMAN BEHAVIOR that we should be focusing on, and all throughout history that has always been changed, otherwise we would still be living in caves as hunter gatherers. If it was in our nature to be greedy or lazy, we would be greedy and lazy all the time no matter what the environmental conditions.
When the conditions that generate greed, laziness and other aberrant behavior are eliminated those behaviors do not manifest. In a culture that rewards sharing, and intelligent use of resources which are made available in abundance, there is nothing to reinforce greedy behaviors. There is no reason to take as much food or as many clothes as possible because there would be no point or reason or fundamental basis to do so. Hoarding only exists in cultures where there is resource scarcity.
By default, people don't know what they want, other than access to the necessities of life. Other than that, their culture can condition them to want anything they want - a car, a big fat flat screen plasma TV, religious/superstitious monuments/ornaments, national flags on their homes, etc. In a culture that does not condition people to want useless items, these tendencies will cease to exist. As an example, an Eskimo cannot possibly fathom wanting a computer unless he is both exposed to the notion of one existing and is conditioned to believe that he needs it.
People may argue, "what if someone wants a gold-plated toilet?" - Again, we have to address and tackle exactly what is it that makes people want such things in the first place.
Same thing for laziness, people aren't lazy for no reason, there is always a cause. People who are lazy mostly have psychological issues such as bad experiences from the past that discourage them from finding the will to act and take responsibility for their own lives. Or, it could be people who are engaged into more compelling activities and neglect other important duties. Either way, it's the environmental conditions that reinforce this behavior and if it can be removed, this behavior will have no foundation.
Other than that, we also have genetic dispositions which can make us more likely to act violently than others in the same situation (i.e. punching someone who has a low-active MAO-A gene will be more likely to retaliate than someone who does not), but ONLY under those conditions. If those environmental conditions do not manifest, neither does this behavior.
5. The people of the future can design whatever city they want, so as long as it conforms to the basic principles of a city-systems approach, using the best methods and materials they know of their time and subjected to various health&safety test analyses, and as science and technology advances, so can their cities. Jacque already mentions this quite thoroughly, he is against people erecting a statue of him of his own city as this would hold people back, what he calls a "straight-jacket" to the people of the future. Jacque Fresco is only one man, he only designed his cities to the best ability he knew at the time of designing (some 30 years ago). Today, we can do far, FAR BETTER (using AI and GA computational models/design softwares). The models you see by Jacque are not what will actually be built, but is to make the point that with science and technology applied properly we can design holistic, integrated social systems architecture.
If people want to live in the forest in a low-tech fashion, away from the city systems, they can do so, but they are responsible for whatever happens to themselves. However they also have the option to be given all the necessities of life for free, given all the safest tools and equipments, and more than adequate supply of information - if they want it.
6. The Venus Project mentions nothing about bulldozing and building over existing cities if there are still millions of people living there. TVP is about SOCIAL EVOLUTION, not revolution. TVP is not something that will happen over night, but will be a gradual process consisting of many transition phases. It might take over 100-200 years or more. First, the current system has to collapse - the global socioeconomic system is doing this now. Oil shortage and mass extinction looks likely, and so would a world-wide social collapse. TVP does not advocate social collapse, but we do offer a more peaceful approach to chaos. If today's existing cities do abandon and turn to rubble in the future however, by all means these cities will be stripped and mined of its resources to build better cities. What TVP also mentions is that in the future, some old cities will be kept as 'museums' to show the people of the future how people lived in our day and age. So yes, there will still be opportunities to keep famous landmarks. Provided they haven't been destroyed by natural or man-made calamities.
7. This is a myth perpetuated and indoctrinated by the current established society to keep people in line. You don't need people sitting on their asses doing 9-5 repetitive mundane robotic chores and conditioning them to be drones...this is inhumane. If people have more time for themselves they are free to explore and adventure, bond with the community and do community activities, free to pursue higher goals such as engage in artistic, creative endeavors, or perform scientific research and development into new technologies - if that is the set of social values that is reinforced in the new culture. Idiocracy is a film based on the capitalist social structure, TVP IS NOT A CAPITALIST SOCIETY. In Idiocracy, the dumbest of society reproduce more than the smartest, and so a dumbing down of society is seen over time. In TVP EVERYBODY WILL BE MORE THAN ADEQUATELY -AND RELEVANTLY- EDUCATED.
Thanks for asking good questions, if you feel I have not answered your questions to your satisfaction, or have more questions, I very much recommend you listen to these radioblogs, which probably have better answers:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/peter-joseph
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/v-radio...-venus-project
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