Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The existence of poverty/hunger/homelessness in a post-scarcity world. if we wanted to eliminate those problems we could, but humans are blocked on how it can be done without hurting their own wealth.
We're not yet in a post scarcity world. We're tantalizing close, but not quite there yet.
There are three main areas we need to work on.
First is power generation. We need more, and it needs to be decupled from fossil fuels. Nuclear is the obvious answer for massive amounts of power output without using massive amounts of land, but fossil fuel lobbies have been hamstringing development since the 50s.
The important thing here isn't just replacing fossil fuels. That would just leave us were we are now. No we need to double or triple world power generation as a start.
The second area that needs work is connected to the first. Transportation. Not just electric cars, but container ships and trains and everything in-between.
This is where that added power generation comes in. We need to make it basically free to move things from point A to point B. There are some ways to do this, particularly for container ships. But we need the raw power available before they become viable.
The final area is automation. We need more. Once people need to be put out of work in massive numbers. We need to decuple work from life.
That final step is the hardest with the most pitfalls. It will happen. Well, the automation and unemployment will happen. After that we can either spiral into a hell scape or rise above into a post scarcity utopia...
It really depends on when and how the guillotines come out
You're right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of "we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don't because we're frozen in place by greed" instead of "this is something we could do with infrastructure today". If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we're stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.