RE: Furthering the Utopia Discussion, version 2.0
Great discussion here! Thanks for linking me to it @sykochica! Having bootstrapped my own business over four years of working a full time job on the side, I know it's possible. I've now been doing it full time for 5 more years and though my business partner and I probably could take a sabbatical because our small team is awesome, I still put in 8+ hour days (less so recently because of Steemit). I too want to research A.I. stuff, specifically the morality of A.I., but I know my team and my customers benefit from my work.
Many view work as a terrible thing, but, I think, it's often that their job sucks and they aren't doing fulfilling work. As they say, if you love what you do, you'll never work another day in your life.
As to practical approaches to sustainable and community living, there are some interesting things going on, even here in Nashville, with co-housing concepts where meals are shared in community spaces. It's pretty interesting stuff... but I also love my home with my family in the suburbs. :)
Glad you joined us!
It's definitely nice to hear of concepts like the business bootstrapping concretely being successful, adding hope.
I actually just read Killer Robots: Artificial Intelligence and Human Extinction in the last few days and got me thinking again on the topic, specifically the pros and cons of AI both as far as protection from extinction as well as the side of determining what's good for the human psychologically. Simply giving a person EVERYTHING they would need or making everything too easy can lead to sloth or other negative behaviours. The concept of needing challenges seems an important part of us. I actually through out this type of AI discussion as a topic for the steemit talk podcast I've started doing with @winstonwolfe .
Here's the pilot we'd done, which didn't have an in depth topic yet: Pilot Steemit Talk
The 2nd one we did earlier today got into the Free Will question that referenced a steemit post. He'll be posting that one tomorrow at noon CST I believe. Were hoping to continue the 'deeper topic' sort of thing.
While it's not a direct analogy to humans, I found this mouse utopia experiment interesting.
It started with a handful of breeding pairs and the mice were provided all the food, water and security from predators they could need. The one limiting factor in this experiment was the Space they were housed in, which could comfortably fit about 600-700. As breeding continued and the population passed about 660, researches started to see changes in behavior. Mice had a hard time getting around each other to do their routine and a few violent behaviors were noticed to occur. As the population continued to grow, more fights between adults happened as well as violence towards the babies started to occur.
The population peaked about 1200 or so and them collapsed due to the mortality rate of young as well as adult deaths. Most the population has actually stopped breeding all together towards the later stages. My interesting take away from this...
Even after the population had dropped back to comfortable space levels, the old behaviors didn't return. The new ones continued and the whole community collapsed to essentially zero. Strange that even after the space restraints returned, the 'civilized' behavior did not.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I need sleep. Yep, definitely need sleep. I look forward to future discussions :)
I've had some fun conversations with @winstonwolfe as well, and I also put something out there on determinism which was fun. I'll have to check out what you all are up to. Yeah, I've been fascinated with the mouse utopia experiment as well. I'm glad humans have more advanced cognitive abilities than mice. :)
It's a shame that killer robots post didn't get more attention. I just gave it my upvote, for what it's worth.
Haha! I couldn't remember the post @winstonwolfe had brought up to start the Free Will conversation, but it was actually in referrence to your determining determinism post. The 2nd podcast is now posted if anyone is interested.
Steemit Talk Podcast 2 - Free Will
Listening now, thanks! :)