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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
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday December 27 2017, @01:31AM (4 children)
The number one problem in society is not internal politics. It’s how you deal with outsiders. And this guy seems to have thrown his hands up in the air and said “Immigrants? What immigrants? It’s not like anybody will want in on my perfect society!”
Without a plan for dealing with this fundamental division, the result would be full-on nationalism. Closed borders breed contempt, and soon enough the centralized economy would be focused on keeping them out and exterminating the ones already inside that look like those bad guys out there.
I guess politics really does go full circle.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:10PM (3 children)
I'll note that the developed world actually does a pretty good job of keeping people out. One doesn't need immigration to perfectly halt, but rather keep it at manageable levels.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:49PM (2 children)
Funny, I thought we did a terrible job keeping those millions (billions?) of immigrants from flooding over the US-Mexico border. And the EU hasn't done a particularly good job of keeping those Syrian refugees out, either.
And sure, in our current society we don't need to keep everybody out. But in this hypothetical "sociocyberneered" perfect society, there can't be any room for outsiders. Not unless they themselves become "sociocyberneered" first. Is there a plan for some kind of lower-tier holding pen for immigrants while this happens to them? Is that even close to humane?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:28PM (1 child)
What does your thinking have to do with reality? First, a billion immigrants in the US would be about one and a half orders of magnitude more immigrants than the US actually has. Second, the recent bout of immigration to the EU has more to do with a temporary combination of factors (such as the Syrian Civil War, Greece's dysfunction, and Germany's rather open invitations) which created an unusual surge of immigration (which already is dwindling).
I don't think any such planners of the society in question would have qualms about "sociocyberneering" immigrants.
Probably not. But one thing they can do is make more such habitats. Even if the mature habitats themselves have low immigration due to fixed size, immigrants can always move into new habitats.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday December 28 2017, @07:21PM
That's not how immigration is done in the USA, so that would be quite the policy shift.
I don't see any point in messing with the USA or Europe anyway. Start with somewhere more dysfunctional, Saudi Arabia or the entire continent of Africa or some place like that. Lets say an experiment "fails" and forces society to the level of western culture in 1935, that sounds bad for the modern USA, but in Mexico or the middle east or all of Africa that would be quite a huge improvement. Heck, 1500s Europe would be an improvement for vast sections of the world.