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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the ideas-merit-discussion dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Jacque Fresco spent decades building a life-sized model of his ideal city. The central idea? If we want the Western world to overcome war, avarice, and poverty, all we need to do is redesign the culture.

[...] This civilization would be created through "sociocyberneering," a radical form of social engineering where automation and technology would bring about "a way of life worthy of man." 171391-02-223

Throughout the interview, Fresco brandished full-color sketches of the future: white domes perched on the surface of the ocean and arranged in concentric circles so as to resemble the structure of an atom. Serving as the city's nucleus was a central computer, which would monitor the ecology of the region—measuring crop yields in farmland, controlling irrigation, and overseeing hydroelectric power grids. Expanding outward were civic centers, museums, and universities, all of which would operate like public libraries in that any cultural artifact would be available for temporary loan. The next largest ring of the city consisted of a residential area, where denizens would dwell amid opulent gardens and manicured parks, in built-to-suit developments. These elliptical abodes would contain every amenity imaginable (at one point, Fresco predicts the invention of entertainment software that sounds breathtakingly similar to Netflix). The city's enclosure—the crust of the circle—would house a massive recycling center to which all trash would be ferried via underground conveyor belts. Once there, automated machines would sort the refuse for proper salvaging.

Fresco was gruff and humorless throughout the interview, wholly immune to King's attempts at playful banter. At one point, he pronounced, "Sociocyberneering is an organization that is probably the boldest organization ever conceived of, and we're undertaking the most ambitious project in the history of mankind."

Source: https://psmag.com/magazine/waiting-for-fresco-social-engineering-technology


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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:05PM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:05PM (#614403) Homepage Journal

    I'm just as well fed and sheltered, if Bill Gates is worth $50 billion as if he is worth $50 million.

    Except that he can outbid you and outcompete you for essential resources.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:05PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:05PM (#614696) Journal

    Except that he can outbid you and outcompete you for essential resources.

    What is the problem with that? Gates demonstrated he could do amazing things with the wealth he has obtained, including create from scratch a business that currently employs hundreds of thousands of people. Why shouldn't he be able to have a larger access to resources as a result?

    One of the basic observations about relatively free markets is that wealth is accumulated by those who make better decisions and try to save wealth, and lost by those who make poor decisions or who deliberate expend wealth for other reasons. This gives the people who are competent and trying to make wealth a larger say in the economy. Sounds like a good thing to me especially if they have a long track record, as Gates does, of making good economic decisions.

    A second related observation which is much more obscure is that a wealthy person who consumes inordinate amounts of resources or make investments with outsized levels of wealth ends up paying more per unit resource or investment than a person buying much less of those resources or making a smaller investment. In other words, while there are economies of scale to large levels of wealth, there are also diminishing returns to even greater, extremely high levels of wealth as well.

    In the US, a typical example is the luxury home versus a regular one. The latter is going to be much cheaper since it is built in bulk, using materials in great supply. The luxury home has to be specially designed and is more expensive at every stage. In this way, wealth is routinely shifted from the wealthy to the less wealthy.

    Extremely high levels of wealth also are far more difficult to invest. You won't be able to get the same high levels of return on investment on $50 billion as you can on $50 million. Most high risk/high return investments are niche markets with only so much you can invest. A chain restaurant, for example, might be very profitable at 50 locations, moderately profitable at 500, and a money sink at 5000 locations, simply because there are limited areas of the US that are suitable for the restaurant's niche.

    And while there are a lot of niches out there, it requires vastly more resources to find more such niches than less with diminishing returns to your attempts to find new niches.

    I'm not totally against a progressive tax system mentioned earlier in this thread. A modest amount of increased responsibility to pay taxes is ok with me. But we have that now. I see no reason to increase those levels in large part because I don't see greater access to wealth by the wealthy as a problem, but rather as a feature. Also, as mentioned above, I see various natural aspects of the economy that transfer wealth from the wealth to the rest of society.

    These actually work quite well, I might add. For example, we have a huge improvement [voxeu.org] in the wealth of the developing world. That has resulted in a massive improvement in global income inequality (which BTW is a much better measure [observer.com] of wealth inequality than wealth inequality itself!). Most of that IMHO has been wealth transfers at the country level which are beyond regulation or deliberate wealth transfers at the state level (and often occur despite interference via protectionism schemes).