beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2019-12-06 01:07 am
beccaelizabeth) wrote2019-12-06 01:07 am
Entry tags:
Utopia
I keep circling back to space colonies because they're a civilisation but small enough to imagine. Like, one paper reckoned you need 40,000 distinct genetic lines to create a self sustaining human population, though a study on Neanderthals recently reckoned they could have died of pure bad luck at 70,000 and I don't know what the difference was. But even if you need one whole Norwich on another planet, it is easier to imagine a Norwich than an Earth, you know?
But someone else asked about what an ideal future civ would look like using a different phrasing, and I'm not sure I could answer their one, so I noodle here again.
There are bits of the world that turn up in newspapers sometimes having run policies that sound pretty excellent. Like prisons with the lowest reoffending rates, where the key turns out to be well trained people who treat prisoners like people, only obviously the details get more complicated. So to build a civilisation I'd want to get people who can look at comparable stats from other places, including ones in other languages, and then pick out ones where we can be like 'yes, that one, more like that'.
Which sounds a bit obvious but I've played online games nd witnessed discussions where their baseline was so obviously American that they couldn't get their head around how Britain already works, let alone anything more utopian than us. Is frustrating. Decent education of people doing the deciding, me very much included, would be a good start.
A properly functioning NHS, free at the point of delivery, is a baseline requirement of civilisation. And It helps if it's big into integrated health policy that deals with prevention and aspects of social care in a connected up way.
Any plan would have to provide enough care hours to go around. It's nice talking about fewer work hours a week but in some areas productivity is meaningless and need does not reduce, so there need to be actual physical humans actually physically there. Sometimes on a two to one basis. And right now the incentive system to make that happen ie money is not really covering it, probably because not enough money for the difficulty and level of responsibility. And that is a problem because the advance of healthcare (yaay) means that a lot of people live longer (yaay) and that can mean a lot longer of needing support.
There are areas where computers and assistive technology and even care robots can make a positive difference. And there are areas where they're not so helpful.
It is my personal opinion that a robot that can do care work competently can pass the turing test and needs treating like any other care worker. Who should all be treated better.
And this is a difficult problem.
It's neat that rhere can be photos with four generations of the same family at once, but if three of those generations have varying support needs at once, that's a little bit tricky for the one that's left to do it. And if the whole family needs support? That's what you need a civilisation for.
You also need to consider failure modes. The failure mode of relying on family is that they might not be paragons and saints. Or have that many hours in the day. The failure mode of relying on money to hire people is the ones that most need to are least capable of doing so.
And then they're back to relying on family.
Who also are trying to have enough money to go around.
Proposals I've seen for Universal Basic Income wouldn't cover the very variable extra costs of disability, and enough for one person to live on wouldn't be enough to hire two people for twenty four hour care, obviously. The gaps need a plan. Right now the plan stretches thin.
There's also problems with isolation and segregation, especially by age.
There's an idea that people naturally want to be around people their own age, and will have most in common with them, and that has a core of truth. But I think dividing us up into school years has done weird things to us socially. And the generational integration is sort of... not.
I saw schemes where small children visit elders supervised by college age people. I've seen housing where students routinely live with elders whose main problem is just not having people around any more. These are plans that need safeguards but they seem like a good place to start. Keep people mixed in together even when more geographic mobility stretches family units apart.
Also, libraries are absolutely essential. Find the libraries with more people using them, the ones which fill a real need in their community, and roll out the good bits widely, even if it costs a money.
I like the Forum because it has coffee and pizza the other side of the beep walls but in the same building. Now that's being part of a community. Food, drink, books.
... I don't much use the Forum but I like the idea.
Accessability of buildings means different things to different groups. We have such a backlog on the basics, like I haven't been to a board game night that would let a wheelchair user participate without epic shenanigans. Physical isolation is enforced by the architecture in weird ways.
And skills shortages are oure weird. I mean you can learn a lot on Youtube, but some practical skills need a second and more learned person around to make sure you don't, like, stick your finger in the socket or something. Forget the cooker is on. ... okay so I don't have a cooker for reasons, but.
I feel like a community place with a really *fancy* kitchen and some people you could book for anything from light safety supervision to actual classes would be grand.
But then I keep planning my ideal building around a sort of cafe arrangement where the people living in the building can book meals in advance and have someone do a cooking.
... I am so tired of tray meals...
I mean they beat what my options would be without tray meals, but.
I don't know about other parts of the world but around here a lot a lot of social need seems to be filled in venues that serve alcohol. Coffee places exist but are fewer than pubs and don't stay open as late. I'm a bit tired of that. I said today I can go to three whole pubs now and someone made a joke about being an alcoholic. I would like to socialise without the upsetting substances. Appletise is good to drink but it's nobody's first thought for the venue.
I don't know if this one is fixable though, people seem to like it this way.
... sometimes I want to make a new town and advertise for vegetarian teetotallers and just, like, have us all in one place? And then the facilities would be appropriate because Many of us?
I also want to redesign urban spaces to assume There Are No Cars. Police need mobility, ambulances need to get there, fire engines need access, so I don't want to actually ban cars. But if the baseline assumption is public transport for all and design that minimises travel anyway, I feel we could get away from the kind of car centered model that damn near traps me in my house. If we designed around the idea that a nice big pedestrian space in the middle of homes was the basic unit we'd get a very different set up. Delivery van road around the back. People first.
I know some people need the cars, but if the police cars can get everywhere then obvs blue badge can get everywhere too.
It's the assumption of cars I object to.
I have to go in to Norwich because my kind of social doesn't happen in my town as far as I know, or my kind of dancing, but I keep daydreaming of small communities.
It don't work in such a fragmented world.
Interests don't come in sets so you can't live next door to people in perfect agreement with you.
Also that would be boring and dystopian if taken too far.
I just mean that I know morris dancing SF fans but not a second Bollywood dancign SF fan around these parts.
... if I only count the ones who go to NSFG at the Ribs I only know a second SF fan...
This multiply connected many to many world we live in makes for interesting challenges among the opportunities. We are not getting the same data set to work from. Even people who wat SF all the time aren't talking about the same shows at the same time, because there's not enough hours in the day to keep up with them all. Whihc is in many respects brilliant, but it means the people who you have a shared frame of reference with are likely to be scattered hither and yon, and you'll only overlap in small parts. I thunk it's part of why polls aren't working so well lately, there's not such large block identities and demographics doesn't tell you as much.
To go from here to utopia means connecting people. The internet should be great at that but the signal to noise issue is... a thing. I don't even know where fandom is at right now and am not looking forward to whatever tech learning curve the next home of fandom will require.
... I'm not sure what fandoms I'm in right now, though Pathfinder would certainly qualify, I feel too new and haven't found the fic yet, not that fic is the primary creative mode for the medium.
It's not just fandom though. More and more government services require a tech learning curve. They've all always required someone to understand teh forms, but more and more of them need you to have a computer, or even a specific type of phone and a particular downloaded app. Something has gone wrong with the model there. And it's leaving people behind. Usually the exact people who most need whatever they'd be applying for with the online only forms.
... yes I'm using a computer to complain about being required to use a computer. I, who have been on the internet since a teenager, would have trouble with a new form, and no clue how to app. At all. Phones have passed me by. It's not simples.
It feels like young people haven't seen theur skills wither often enough to actually realise what the problem is, and older people are either right there with you or have themselves kept up and it limits their sympathy.
How is it we have more computers and fewer comouter repair places?
This world. So many moving parts.
So the future needs to be connected, but in ways that endure.
Mobility, in so many senses, is a freeing necessity.
But the ability to get out of a bad situation is being limited by a whole stack of factors right now, and the ability to build a good one is... tricky.
It's like some segments have switched to an assumption of nomadic behaviour, or at least a willingness to spend a whole numbers percentage of your life commuting, whilst other services demand and rely on a local connection.
Messes.
Needs solved.
Don't know how.
Whuch is why I keep wandering back to
you have two hundred people and a Stargate
who do you bring, and what do you do once you get there?
Easier answers in the first years than any fix to, you know, civilisation, what do.
But someone else asked about what an ideal future civ would look like using a different phrasing, and I'm not sure I could answer their one, so I noodle here again.
There are bits of the world that turn up in newspapers sometimes having run policies that sound pretty excellent. Like prisons with the lowest reoffending rates, where the key turns out to be well trained people who treat prisoners like people, only obviously the details get more complicated. So to build a civilisation I'd want to get people who can look at comparable stats from other places, including ones in other languages, and then pick out ones where we can be like 'yes, that one, more like that'.
Which sounds a bit obvious but I've played online games nd witnessed discussions where their baseline was so obviously American that they couldn't get their head around how Britain already works, let alone anything more utopian than us. Is frustrating. Decent education of people doing the deciding, me very much included, would be a good start.
A properly functioning NHS, free at the point of delivery, is a baseline requirement of civilisation. And It helps if it's big into integrated health policy that deals with prevention and aspects of social care in a connected up way.
Any plan would have to provide enough care hours to go around. It's nice talking about fewer work hours a week but in some areas productivity is meaningless and need does not reduce, so there need to be actual physical humans actually physically there. Sometimes on a two to one basis. And right now the incentive system to make that happen ie money is not really covering it, probably because not enough money for the difficulty and level of responsibility. And that is a problem because the advance of healthcare (yaay) means that a lot of people live longer (yaay) and that can mean a lot longer of needing support.
There are areas where computers and assistive technology and even care robots can make a positive difference. And there are areas where they're not so helpful.
It is my personal opinion that a robot that can do care work competently can pass the turing test and needs treating like any other care worker. Who should all be treated better.
And this is a difficult problem.
It's neat that rhere can be photos with four generations of the same family at once, but if three of those generations have varying support needs at once, that's a little bit tricky for the one that's left to do it. And if the whole family needs support? That's what you need a civilisation for.
You also need to consider failure modes. The failure mode of relying on family is that they might not be paragons and saints. Or have that many hours in the day. The failure mode of relying on money to hire people is the ones that most need to are least capable of doing so.
And then they're back to relying on family.
Who also are trying to have enough money to go around.
Proposals I've seen for Universal Basic Income wouldn't cover the very variable extra costs of disability, and enough for one person to live on wouldn't be enough to hire two people for twenty four hour care, obviously. The gaps need a plan. Right now the plan stretches thin.
There's also problems with isolation and segregation, especially by age.
There's an idea that people naturally want to be around people their own age, and will have most in common with them, and that has a core of truth. But I think dividing us up into school years has done weird things to us socially. And the generational integration is sort of... not.
I saw schemes where small children visit elders supervised by college age people. I've seen housing where students routinely live with elders whose main problem is just not having people around any more. These are plans that need safeguards but they seem like a good place to start. Keep people mixed in together even when more geographic mobility stretches family units apart.
Also, libraries are absolutely essential. Find the libraries with more people using them, the ones which fill a real need in their community, and roll out the good bits widely, even if it costs a money.
I like the Forum because it has coffee and pizza the other side of the beep walls but in the same building. Now that's being part of a community. Food, drink, books.
... I don't much use the Forum but I like the idea.
Accessability of buildings means different things to different groups. We have such a backlog on the basics, like I haven't been to a board game night that would let a wheelchair user participate without epic shenanigans. Physical isolation is enforced by the architecture in weird ways.
And skills shortages are oure weird. I mean you can learn a lot on Youtube, but some practical skills need a second and more learned person around to make sure you don't, like, stick your finger in the socket or something. Forget the cooker is on. ... okay so I don't have a cooker for reasons, but.
I feel like a community place with a really *fancy* kitchen and some people you could book for anything from light safety supervision to actual classes would be grand.
But then I keep planning my ideal building around a sort of cafe arrangement where the people living in the building can book meals in advance and have someone do a cooking.
... I am so tired of tray meals...
I mean they beat what my options would be without tray meals, but.
I don't know about other parts of the world but around here a lot a lot of social need seems to be filled in venues that serve alcohol. Coffee places exist but are fewer than pubs and don't stay open as late. I'm a bit tired of that. I said today I can go to three whole pubs now and someone made a joke about being an alcoholic. I would like to socialise without the upsetting substances. Appletise is good to drink but it's nobody's first thought for the venue.
I don't know if this one is fixable though, people seem to like it this way.
... sometimes I want to make a new town and advertise for vegetarian teetotallers and just, like, have us all in one place? And then the facilities would be appropriate because Many of us?
I also want to redesign urban spaces to assume There Are No Cars. Police need mobility, ambulances need to get there, fire engines need access, so I don't want to actually ban cars. But if the baseline assumption is public transport for all and design that minimises travel anyway, I feel we could get away from the kind of car centered model that damn near traps me in my house. If we designed around the idea that a nice big pedestrian space in the middle of homes was the basic unit we'd get a very different set up. Delivery van road around the back. People first.
I know some people need the cars, but if the police cars can get everywhere then obvs blue badge can get everywhere too.
It's the assumption of cars I object to.
I have to go in to Norwich because my kind of social doesn't happen in my town as far as I know, or my kind of dancing, but I keep daydreaming of small communities.
It don't work in such a fragmented world.
Interests don't come in sets so you can't live next door to people in perfect agreement with you.
Also that would be boring and dystopian if taken too far.
I just mean that I know morris dancing SF fans but not a second Bollywood dancign SF fan around these parts.
... if I only count the ones who go to NSFG at the Ribs I only know a second SF fan...
This multiply connected many to many world we live in makes for interesting challenges among the opportunities. We are not getting the same data set to work from. Even people who wat SF all the time aren't talking about the same shows at the same time, because there's not enough hours in the day to keep up with them all. Whihc is in many respects brilliant, but it means the people who you have a shared frame of reference with are likely to be scattered hither and yon, and you'll only overlap in small parts. I thunk it's part of why polls aren't working so well lately, there's not such large block identities and demographics doesn't tell you as much.
To go from here to utopia means connecting people. The internet should be great at that but the signal to noise issue is... a thing. I don't even know where fandom is at right now and am not looking forward to whatever tech learning curve the next home of fandom will require.
... I'm not sure what fandoms I'm in right now, though Pathfinder would certainly qualify, I feel too new and haven't found the fic yet, not that fic is the primary creative mode for the medium.
It's not just fandom though. More and more government services require a tech learning curve. They've all always required someone to understand teh forms, but more and more of them need you to have a computer, or even a specific type of phone and a particular downloaded app. Something has gone wrong with the model there. And it's leaving people behind. Usually the exact people who most need whatever they'd be applying for with the online only forms.
... yes I'm using a computer to complain about being required to use a computer. I, who have been on the internet since a teenager, would have trouble with a new form, and no clue how to app. At all. Phones have passed me by. It's not simples.
It feels like young people haven't seen theur skills wither often enough to actually realise what the problem is, and older people are either right there with you or have themselves kept up and it limits their sympathy.
How is it we have more computers and fewer comouter repair places?
This world. So many moving parts.
So the future needs to be connected, but in ways that endure.
Mobility, in so many senses, is a freeing necessity.
But the ability to get out of a bad situation is being limited by a whole stack of factors right now, and the ability to build a good one is... tricky.
It's like some segments have switched to an assumption of nomadic behaviour, or at least a willingness to spend a whole numbers percentage of your life commuting, whilst other services demand and rely on a local connection.
Messes.
Needs solved.
Don't know how.
Whuch is why I keep wandering back to
you have two hundred people and a Stargate
who do you bring, and what do you do once you get there?
Easier answers in the first years than any fix to, you know, civilisation, what do.