Aliens have come and kidnapped the first human they came across, unfortunately, that was you. They take you to a new planet almost identical to our current Earth, but without anything man-made.
The aliens say you can have 1 million real humans to start “New Earth” and you can put them anywhere and teach them anything you want. You’ll have 1,000 years to make a good New Earth and if the Aliens like it, you’ll get to keep it, if not they will blow it up and try again with someone else. You will have access to old Earths internet so you will have the choice on what technologies you introduce and when. You live in the ship, but you can choose to pop in and out of New Earth as you please. You will not be burdened with all 1 million humans at once. You can choose to add a small number of them at a time until you get the proper resources established.
Edit: The humans can reproduce, and will unless you implement some form of birth control to prevent them from doing so. Also the first 1 million humans will start with the basic knowledge of how to human and you can pick personality traits for them, like you would a Sim, but the babies they make are blank slates.
You don’t have to try and make it a good society, you can choose to watch the world burn for 1,000 years. Up to you.
Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!
Seriously though, my goal would be to build a society that exists for and is utterly committed to providing for the needs of all of its citizens. All else is secondary. The rule is simple: have a pulse? Congratulations, you’ve won a lifetime supply of all the clean air, healthy food, pure water, sturdy and comfortable housing, quality education, and top-tier healthcare you need to live a long, comfortable life in which you can pursue whatever you’re passionate about so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else (and there will probably be a stern talking-to for anyone who seems set on hurting themselves.)
Aside from teaching skills and such, education would also convey the importance of community, cooperation, helping each other, etc to the pursuit of maximizing individual liberty for everyone.
This works if everyone is willing to put in the effort to contribute, how do you handle those who are not willing or able to do so? I feel like everyone is probably able to make meaningful contributions to a society in one way or the other, but what about those that just don’t wanna? Do you think the number would be high? I’m not sure.
Why do you imagine people wouldn’t contribute? People aren’t only motivated by money - unless I’ve somehow been missing out on getting paid for doing the dishes, cleaning up trash at the park, or helping my friends move this whole time. People are so programmed by capitalism to stop any idea that comes into their head that might challenge the status quo and apply the ‘rugged individualism’ bullshit to it until they figure out how it couldn’t possibly work, while failing to realize that humans worked together for thousands of years before capitalism came along and taught us all that we should be thinking of ourselves first, last, and only.
But also you missed something important here, in the first two words:
What contribution do you imagine is required if automation can meet everyone’s needs? This isn’t the real world, we’ve got goddamned aliens in space ships flying around, there’s no reason to believe someone with that level of technology couldn’t automate away literally everything. And even if that wasn’t the case, the point of the bit I said about education was explicitly to deprogram people who are still hung up on capitalism’s ‘fuck you I got mine’ attitude, if that’s required (the prompt said nothing about where these people come from, what their preconceived notions are, etc, so I was covering all bases.)
Based on this part
I wouldn’t have anything to “contribute” as I don’t consider myself passionate about anything. All I would do is consume media if all my other needs were met.
Passion isn’t something you either have or you don’t, it’s something you develop by being curious about the world, by seeing a need that you could fulfill and wanting to feel useful, etc. Sitting on the couch all day is not the way to develop your passion (take it from someone who has done it). Find something you care about, find a way to help make it better. But, if everyone’s needs are met by automation I see no reason you couldn’t be a giant couch potato if that’s all you want out of life, because no contribution is required of anyone at that point. I’m not here to judge.
Yeah I don’t have any of that curiosity, ability to fulfill needs, things to care about or make better either.
They’re skills, they require practice like everything else.
I have been on disability and unable to work for ~14 years now, and I certainly went through a long phase of just being a big couch potato with no ambition or dream other than to do the least amount of work I could possibly get away with and still have a tolerable life. My house was a mess, I was a mess, shit fell through the cracks, etc. But it wasn’t those things that drove me out of that pit, it was boredom. I started watching youtube videos and stumbled into science-related topics and discovered that despite hating school I actually quite enjoy learning. That’s what rekindled that curiosity in me, the drive to be doing something to better myself all the time, even if it was just packing my head full of information that served no other purpose other than it being pretty fucking cool to know shit about the world. From there I got motivated to read (I used to read literally everything I could get my hands on, and stopped for various reasons), to start caring about my health, to take care of myself, etc, and from there I started wanting things again. I discovered that what I - a ~20-year veteran of network engineering and security - am passionate about is writing and politics, so now I divide most of my time between seeking out deep, serious political discussions/debates and trying to write a novel (emphasis on the ‘trying’; maybe it’ll work out, maybe it won’t, but in the meantime I’m writing and it’s making me happy.)
I’m not saying all this to say ‘lookit me, I’m so fuckin’ awesome’, but to say that even going from being really depressed it’s still possible to find things in the world to be interested in and if you pursue those interests you will find something you’re passionate about. If you want to.
That’s cool and good for you and all, seems like you had some good bases to build from, but that ain’t me.
I’m not big on skills or practice. Can’t rekindle a curiosity that I’ve never had. Can’t stick with anything long enough for self-improvement. Never enjoyed reading. No career to speak of, worked food service more than anything else.
I’m just running out the clock. Day by day, week by week, year by year.
No, I did not have some good bases to build from. I built myself back up from a years-long depression in which I had firmly decided that I was definitely going to end my life. But when the moment came I discovered that, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t do it. At which point I was left with no choice but to start finding ways to make life a bit less miserable no matter what it took. I dug myself out of that hole not because I had ‘good bases to build from’ but because I had no other choice. It sucked a whole lot for a long time, but having come through the other side of it I can tell you that it was absolutely worth it to put in the effort. Also when I say rekindled curiosity I mean the kind everyone has in childhood. I lost it sometime around puberty (for a variety of reasons), and didn’t get it back until my 40s.
But if that’s the case re:running out the clock, let me ask you this - and I am by NO means suggesting a particular course of action here - why keep marking time? What do you gain from it that’s better than the alternative? There must be something, right? Figure out what it is and latch onto it like it’s the last lifeboat off the Titanic. The thing about life is that you don’t find meaning, you don’t get handed meaning by someone else, you make it yourself: you decide what is meaningful to you and what isn’t. If you’re content with the way things are then great, but if not then it’s on you to make a change.
We definitely have aliens in spaceships flying around in the real world.
Also I don’t doubt that technology can evolve well past anything we know because you would start pretty close to where we are now, but you don’t get magic powers you still have to have scientist and tech bros figuring shit out and inventing new shit and YOU have to teach at least the first few generations how to do that. You’re not just snapping whatever you want into existence, and the aliens are not helping you. I don’t doubt you can get to “Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!” over 1,000 years, but someone somewhere is gonna have to put some effort into it.
Why do I assume people wouldn’t contribute? It seems reasonable that at least some people will want to smoke weed instead of building houses, but idk! I literally said that I wasn’t sure and asked what the solution was because this is fun little prompt that I am curious about and want to hear everyone’s different perspectives on. I think that asking follow up questions is kinda reasonable.
I, uh… we’re gonna have to agree to disagree on that one, chief.
But the aliens have already invented all that shit, so it seems like a real dick move to not let us use it. Especially since if we have to reinvent technology from the ground up all over again there’s a whoooole lot of people who are going to die that wouldn’t have had to otherwise, so that’s trending into ‘if god exists he’s a fucking asshole for allowing people to suffer needlessly’ territory. I’m gonna assume they’re helpful aliens, cause otherwise I’d have to pause my experiment to tell them just exactly what I think of them, but with guns instead of a few impolite words.
That’s fair. If everyone’s needs are taken care of then there’s no requirement to contribute at all. Sit on the couch and smoke weed if that’s what makes you happy. But having done that for a few years I have to say I found it hard to not get up and do something useful on occasion. In the scenario where everything isn’t fully automated? Well, if you don’t care about your community and don’t want to make your/their lives better, why are you a part of it? Maybe you’d be happier somewhere else. Life (currently) requires effort to sustain, if you aren’t willing to put in that effort then it seems like you’re probably not terribly interested in continuing to live, so maybe there’s a conversation to be had about that.
This is an interesting prompt. Critically it seems like you definitely aren’t omnipotent, so whilst you can try to influence and teach the new inhabitants, there’s nothing stopping them simply ignoring you and doing something else.
Rather than some wanting to just not contribute, I’d be more concerned by a group deciding to focus their efforts on building weapons and simply taking what they want from others.
Fully automated luxury gay space communism is certainly an ideal, but it is extremely vulnerable to hostile forces until it gets large enough and willing enough to excert eqivalent force in return. Hostile forces can be military, ideological, or resource limit based. Responding to all of those, is a massive challenge.
Sci-fi writer Ursula Leguin wrote a book about an anarcho-syndicalistic society called The Dispossessed. In that book, those who ‘opted out’ of this society were barred from enjoying the fruits of the collective labor but could still live on the outskirts and start their own subsistence farm or whatever. Societal control in that story was basically maintained through personal relationships among the community (shame those who don’t want to contribute) whereas the capitalistic society control method is threaten with death by restricting access to resources (home,food,water,etc). I’m not saying public shaming is the best route, but it’s still more humane than work or die.