First of all, I'd like to introduce myself as a huge fan of Star Trek.
And I heard that Elon Musk said the cost of production will be zero thanks to Artificial Intelligence, and that the currency will be gone.
As soon as I heard that, I thought it's like Star Trek, the universe where Post-scarcity was achieved, except in reality, there is no replicator, transporter, or warp drive yet.
"A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy."
"The Acquisition Of Wealth Is No Longer The Driving Force In Our Lives.
We Work To Better Ourselves And The Rest Of Humanity."
– Captain Jean Luc Picard
Then, do you think his word will come true in the future, and we shall all be in bliss?
But I also got a bad feeling that Earth will be ruled by MegaCorps.
What is your opinion on this?
Do you think our future is like Star Trek?
byu/No_Move_6683 inFuturology
35 Comments
Early 80’s kid. I grew up thinking that by the 2000’s we would have teleporters and would have evolved beyond our currency based inequality system.
No, our future won’t be like Star Trek. At this rate, it will be more like Blade Runner.
Don’t forget that Star Trek is also after a very nasty world war.
Nope, blade runner or cyberpunk is where we are heading
Cyberpunk mixed with Mad Max and dystopian horror movies.
Something like Elysium.
Elon musk says many many stupid things. That doesn’t even make the smallest amount of sense. Production won’t be free. Ever.
I hope we go the way of star trek. Who knows.
If we do not -forcibly- remove the wealthy from power, our world will -never- be like Star Trek.
Musk and his buds may relinquish wealth, but they will replace it with a different power over humanity. Thats what we need to be aware of.
You know the bit in Star Trek history where there is a massive war that nearly wipes out humanity, and then the Vulcans come along? Yeah.
Well our future is a lot like that, except without the Vulcans…
I think it could be, eventually. Keep in mind they had to live trough WW3 first though.
“Elon Musk said.” That’s a red scammy, scummy, nazi flag right there.
“Money will be irrelevant, but I’m keeping loads of it just in case.”
Umm – Musk’s goal is to hoard $10 trillion dollars.
No. We’re heading into something like Interstellar. But without the global cohesion and the space stations and the space travel and the robotics and everything like that.
Just climate collapse and the end of humanity.
That technology is way down the line, unless humans extend their life expectancy don’t anticipate seeing any of it regardless of if it happens or not.
Star Trek portraits a society where money is an obsolete concept, capitalism is thing of the stupid human past and the Earth as no countries and works together as a single Federation. I think warp drive is the more realistic concept between these lol
> I heard that Elon Musk said the cost of production will be zero thanks to Artificial Intelligence, and that the currency will be gone.
Elon Musk says a lot of things, but ultimately all he really aspires is power for himself, which is essentially the opposite of a Star Trek like future.
Even with today’s technology, the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough money, enough resources, etc. to give everybody a dignified life with less work. The problem is that the ownership of that money and those resources are distributed very unevenly, and that this inequality between the very rich and the rest of us is only growing.
Which may ultimately lead to the outcome that you are fearing (and which has in part already happened), that the earth is increasingly ruled by a few large companies, owned by a few rich people.
BTW, “the cost will be zero” is a stupid statement. Obviously that can’t be true because you have to use some kind of energy and other resources for any production, all of which is finite.
The future isn’t going to be the same for everyone everywhere. There will likely some places that figure it out.
You can’t be a humanitarian and an asshole at the same time. For as much positive bluster as he produces his life doesn’t match the sentiment anymore at least.
I think enough of Elon’s predictions have missed that we can stop listening to a word he says. I think he has shown his motivations are corporate profits that we can stop thinking he cares about human benefit.
You think the side trying to be the first to 10 trillion has any aspirations toward a civilization of unrestricted abundance?
Maybe one day, in the distant future, many generations from now. After guys like Elon bring us the eugenics wars.
Not the way humans keep wanting to hoard all capital and resources into the hands of a few individuals , no. A socialist utopia scares too many people. Our future, unfortunately is looking more and more like cyberpunk lore where we are all slaves to warring corpo-states.
No, in Star Trek we had WW3 with nuclear weapons. So, not without wiping out most of humankind.
Cost of production going down will only benefit the corporations, not the consumers. There will still be just as much or even more scarcity, just with bigger margins and more people without jobs.
We had a taste of how the wealthy could run things when Musk was in control of reducing USA government spending. Cuts without a lot of logic.
There can be no post scarcity until land and resources stop being limited.
So no, we aren’t like Star Trek, and as always Musk is little more than a drugged up dipshit talking out his ass
When Elon Musk imagines the future he imagines Dune.
When I imagine the future I see The Expanse.
More Star Wars – we need to get back on the Star Trek track of evolution- FAST
My opinion on this is that Elon Musk is a moron whose job it is to say ridiculous things to get attention in the press, so spending a lot of mental energy taking him seriously is a waste of time.
That said, a human society like Star Trek requires a LOT of a advancements that not only don’t exist yet, but that we have no notion if they’re even *possible*, ***and*** for the benefits of said advancements to become universally accessible, which runs counter to historical precedent.
So no, I doubt Star Trek is in our future. Cyberpunk is far more likely.
Humans won’t get along so long as religion exists. And Musk should’ve never left the cave his papa used to fuck him in. Best we can hope for is Wall-E, but I have a feeling we’ll be eating eachother before switching to an all bug diet.
Early Star Trek and early TNG was the whole post-scarcity vibe. Later Star Trek abandoned it somewhat. Even McCoy has money in Star Trek 3, he tried to buy a charter ship, for example. So they talk the talk but do not walk the walk. Jean Luc Picard’s brother runs the family vineyard until he later takes it over in ST:Pic. Do they give that away for free? Okay so what do they get for it then? Oh yeah money.
Sure enough the Ferengi love gold pressed latinum. So the humans on DS9 also have some. How do they get it?
I’d like to believe we could have post-scarcity in the future but that Star Trek didn’t even commit enough to it in fiction, not consistently. People and companies with power will be the first and possibly only ones to have nanoforges/replicators/biomatter printers, for the longest time. They don’t even want us to have wind and solar power, instead insisting we have to haveoil or use fracking to release gas.
Look it is either Star Trek or Terminator. Nothing in between.
And I have few hopes that we’ll resolve the alignment problem faster than the AI has more power than we can control.
We are gambling our future big time, and the odds are not in our favor.
Lets hope we win.
I’m not that good with my star trek lore, but isn’t star trek set *after* a cyberpunk-esque dystopia and nuclear war devastated humanity, or something like that?
Maybe the whole ww3 part with a dash of the eugenics war thrown in our current direction
There’s a lot of pessmistic pushback here, and it is interesting/disturbing to see in general how much more pessimistic this sub has become in the last few years. 5 or 6 years ago this sub was often ridiculously, wildly optimistic. This change to some extent seems to reflect cultural vibe shifts more than anything else. It is also striking how people can be extremely confident about this sort of thing even as the prevailing views changes radically in just a few years.
So here’s my answer: we don’t know. Some trends look really good, and other trends look really bad, and where any of them are going and which are going to win out is hard to predict. So one shouldn’t be confident here either way. But if things do go well it will be in part because we as a whole took the effort to make them go well. Unfortunately, it also isn’t always clear except in retrospect which things really will help make things better. But that also doesn’t remove our moral obligations to try.
Progress always looks negative up close, but in the long run the trend for humanity has been up, up, up. We complain about lives today that our ancestors—even recent ancestors—would consider unimaginable paradise. My guess is that trend will continue.