Will the human civilization ever be utopian

Will the human civilization ever be utopian?

The name “utopia” (meaning “no place”) presumes that a utopia cannot be a place. A utopia can be an imaginary place.

A utopia is not a place but is an idea and, as such, it exists in the human mind. Utopia concerns an idealized human behavioral model. It is a blueprint of society. As a model, a utopia is a yardstick to measure features and capabilities of an existing or planned social system. Economy. Taxes, Government. Religion. All topics are fair game for discussion. Topics are fair game for exclusion too; one must not invest excessive time on non-essential features.

As a model, a utopia provides enough of a blueprint that one contemplating human behavioral systems has a tool set for thinking. Figuring out substantive reasons why some human or group’s utopian idea won’t work creates obvious questions. Why not? What could we do more of to further the outcome? What should there be less of?

Having identified one variable. Are there others? Are they correlated or independent? Are there whole defective systems that must be gutted to make a utopia work.

A utopia is not an outcome, in the sense of saying, “we eliminate poverty” or proclaiming “there is war no more”. Such sayings define outcomes. The very outcomes themselves are subjective and subject to interpretation.

A utopia is a model of a working social system which provide goods and services. A utopia explains “how” such a system will behave and what constraints are necessary to assure the behavior comes into being and persists. That it fills its niche and delivers its product in a time affordable and money cost-effective manner. That is contains no hidden social pathology.

My credentials on this topic are that I wrote a book “Newland 2084” about a future world of stable population. Local sustainable communities at the scale of 12,000 humans provide militia scale order. Human producer and consumer cooperatives provide basic human needs. 0% interest loans are available for basic needs, education, housing. NO PREDATORS Everything is decided by changeable (LivingVote) democratic 60%+ vote on an issue by issue basis. NO POLITICIANS. Profit is shared with cooperative members in the form of patronage. I write at Newland Cooperative | Facebook and Newland Coop.

Dystopia to Utopia

Is there a word for an art style or world setting that looks like cyberpunk but is utopic as opposed to dystopic?

I wrote a book “Newland 2084″ which is classified as sci-fi cyberpunk utopia. Previous discussions led me to conclude that the words “cyberpunk utopia” don’t make sense together. This answer offers insight into the words “cyberpunk”, “dystopia”, and “utopia”.

Wikipedia says Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction in a future setting that tends to focus on society as "high tech low life" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as information and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social.
An observer of earth events today would find rapidly changing information and technology juxtaposed with a breakdown of social order. Everything is changing at a fast pace. It is the fast exchange of information that is the root cause of the dissolution of the old order and the creation of the new.

Assuming that the world behaves as a dystopic pretty much everywhere on the planet, the transition to a future world where utopias have the opportunity to emerge in a localized manner.

THE PROBLEM is in the words themselves. Assume we are now at an intermediate stepping point in the timeline of civilization. Everything is falling apart. All of our systems appear to be broken or fast becoming so. The people of the United States and elsewhere are working to make sure that the world gets put back together in a better form. That is where we are.

The root problem is easily visualized on a two dimensional graph with a dystopia being in the lower left origin point of a mathematical function starting in today’s dystopia and moving it to the right over time and upwards in the progression away from today’s dystopia towards utopia which in a goal somewhere vertical axis.

The word “dystopia” presumes disorder and progression along the horizontal time axis until order appears, order increases, sharply upward for a time as order increases to a point and then levels off. Order approaches utopia but seldom attains it. Social disorder decreases on the pathway to utopian class order.

THE ANSWER is that we are moving lots of broken systems from their current state into a future operating state that makes better sense. Every system has to get broken before it can be put back together. When enough things become broken enough and then put back again, a new and better operating forms gets built.

We are on our way as a species towards the Golden Age of ancient prophecy. The computers and the information itself are the vehicle that gets us there in most ways. We anticipate a new world where the top-down order and control hierarchy must give way to an emergent system. The deep connections at the social media layer of organizations become the new order. Control signals from above are respected but the order emerges from the bottom.

Human time is the fundamental driver of social order transformation. Capital buys human time. Without human time and energy invested the system does not run on time. That is the way it used to be.

THE ANSWER

The search for an attention grabbing genre leads to the conclusion that “cyberpunk” is the means of transforming the current dystopian into a utopia. Therefore the best distinctions might be.

1. Sci-fi cyberpunk - classic definition
2. Sci-fi cyberpunk dystopia - the beginning state
3. Sci-fi cyberpunk transition, transformation, of emergence
4. Sci-fi cyberpunk utopia - the final stable state

Jobs To Survive

Quora question and my answer.

Imagine a world where no one has to have a job to comfortably survive. What activities would we invent to infuse our lives with meaning and structure?

In a future utopian world, where no one has to have a job to comfortably survive, is ambiguous in the phrase “no one has to have a job” which implies a choice of whether or not jobs exist and one can have one. The word “comfortable” would be measured in whose estimation? According to what criteria?

Clearly some number of humans have to work at jobs in order to make sure the undesirable jobs get done and, more important, to make sure dangerous and risky work like mining be done by the remote control of an experienced operator. Cops have to break up domestic conflicts. People get sick and need surgery. There is critical work that must be done. Spreadsheet estimates place the amount of human time consumed by essential of education, health care, and elder care services to be one third of the time available. The remaining two thirds is for everything else.

Entrepreneurs would still have ideas and want to build businesses to fill time and make money. Does money even need to exist? Maybe all we need to keep track of is human time. Your value to society of one hour of your time is one hour times your value multiplier, based on education, experience and age. People are going to entertain one another. Plays need to be written. Movies will still need to be made. Producers create products for which consumers will pay money.

Life will change with each passing generation. There will always be new fads to enthrall us. We will live in a world of plastic objects printed by 3D printers. We do this today. We will make composite materials many times stronger than steel. The amount of carbon brought to the earth’s surface is immaterial provided, the carbon is sequestered in plastic. Putting carbon into the atmosphere has its side effects. Therefore the future will be in polymers, plastics, composites, and high quality ash from carbon gasification.

If those who live in those utopian days have the free time implicit is the question. What they will the do to fill their allotted time of life with very much what we would do if we had more time and we didn’t have to work for wages to pay the bills.

1. Personal health and happiness
2. Family, friends, and meeting new people
3. Education
4. Producing and consuming works of art
5. Lowering the hassle factor of life
6. Volunteering for community, national, and international public service
7. Making enough money to travel to far away places to make great movies and photographs for internet slide shows.
8. Have a travel blog that has a following and earns lots of income

If money needs to exist then people can borrow enough money to meet minimalist basic needs, education, and medical needs at 0% interest. The loan is paid it back through a lifetime of work. I wrote about this idea in “Newland 2084”. The book elaborates on the premise that people arrange themselves into cooperatives where they aggregate skills, premises, equipment, materials and go into business. One member one vote. Compensate people for time. Divide profits fairly.

Is USA an Economic Utopia?

This answer is based upon the Quora question Is the United States an example of an Economic Utopia?

A “Utopia” cannot exist in real space and time because the meaning of the word is “no place”. A utopia is a vision. It lives inside the human brain. The vision of a utopia can be spoken, written down, or presented in some producer work. Another human can hear, read, or consume the utopian vision. Utopia requires easily understood rules. It requires communication from one human brain to another.

OPINION

At the level of our Constitution, we are not a utopia now because of direct taxation of the people. We need an Amendment to our Constitution to abolish Income Tax and replace it with a 10% Sales Tax. It must be a universal gross sales cost that is applied to every currency transactions and has no exemptions. No VAT tax. Rich or poor person. Beggar or investor. Government itself. Church donations. Mortgage. Food. Utilities. Stock market trader. Private jet buyer and flyer. Food, Clothing. If money changes hands taxes are owed. Swapping mass or energy based products is taxable. Other swapped transactions owe taxes on gross sales. If unpaid human time is swapped, no transaction cost are implied. Sales Tax is not collected on time swap transactions. When human time is converted to money taxes on income from human time investments is not taxed.

The gross sale includes an automatic 10% U.S. Sales Tax. Pay off the national debt and then lower the tax rate and see what happens.

If you come up short and can’t pay your basic living, housing, utilities, transportation, education, and medical bills, the Federal Reserve Bank FRB will let you close all credit cards forever and then they will then lend you the money you need at 0% interest to make your other bills. You will pay the 0% interest loan money back over a lifetime of work.

The above described USA would be an Economic Utopia.