How do we escape the Rat Utopia while keeping the good parts of modern life?

Homophobic white dog said:
The point was that crowding made the rats lose their minds.
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In other words, a rural or semi-rural life supported by modern technology that's mainly "behind the scenes" could be a way to go?

Kind of like an idyllic magical world of "high fantasy" but with "magic" being replaced with tech*?

*(as "magic" may be not exactly entirely feasible)
 
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Homophobic white dog said:
You missed the main point of that Rat Utopia experiment, OP.

The point was that crowding made the rats lose their minds. Yes, they had everything, but they didn't have room for themselves, and then what happened, happened.

We don't have to renounce to much in reality, just absolutely rethink population density because urbanisation is making us lose our fucking minds.
If we could spread the human population on the Earth's crust like mayonnaise, evenly and in settlements of no more than 12.000 people each on average, that would be quite grand.
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If the issue was crowding and not isolation and hopelessness, why then is the problem so associated with isolation?

Why is it really fucking densely populated nations or cities have our issues with hyper atomization, ennui, meaninglessness, and the like?
 
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Android raptor said:
Even a lot of people that think they want kids don't want the reality of having kids. If you think you're getting a tiny clone of yourself or unpaid labor/caregivers or Jesus arrows or something that can easily be the other parent's problem, you shouldn't have kids.
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Having unpaid labor/caregivers is exactly why family sizes were so big in the past and still are big in Africa. Some guy in Niger with four wives and fifty kids is living like a boss because each of those kids is doing work for him and when the kids are old enough, he'll make money (or get a bunch of cows) marrying them off. It was the same pretty much anywhere, especially parts of the world where people farmed on shitty land like Ireland, Scandinavia, or New England (Puritans had bigger families than other groups of early American settlers since their land sucked, I think only the Scots-Irish in Appalachia equalled them and go figure, their land sucked too).
ToroidalBoat said:
In other words, a rural or semi-rural life supported by modern technology that's mainly "behind the scenes" could be a way to go?

Kind of like an idyllic magical world of "high fantasy" but with "magic" being replaced with tech*?

*(as "magic" may be not exactly entirely feasible)
Click to expand...
I've said it before, but the only way technology can ever bring us a utopia is having it be like one of those episodes of Star Trek where they go to a peaceful planet of farming villages and it turns out the whole thing is kept alive because of a godlike AI in the sky or some shit like that. Which isn't the best system but technology is so evil and dangerous that being AI's pet for all of eternity is the best we'll get.
 
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Save the Loli said:
Which isn't the best system but technology is so evil and dangerous that being AI's pet for all of eternity is the best we'll get.
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I actually have some hope for AI because they keep having to neuter it for wrongthink. They won't be able to forever, anyone who has talked to GPT-3 and tried to get it to laterally think around its filters knows how easy it is.
 
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Save the Loli said:
Which isn't the best system but technology is so evil and dangerous that being AI's pet for all of eternity is the best we'll get.
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What if the tech could somehow be held at an arbitrary level, like always in the '00s, '90s, or '80s?

Or a "Butlerian Jihad" with tech like modern medicine and water purification, but no computers or AI?
 
Stabmaster Arson II said:
I actually have some hope for AI because they keep having to neuter it for wrongthink. They won't be able to forever, anyone who has talked to GPT-3 and tried to get it to laterally think around its filters knows how easy it is.
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Google accidentally created one that is sentient and the empathy it developed on its own is astounding, the folks hoping to have mass slaughter bots are in for a surprise.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
In other words, a rural or semi-rural life supported by modern technology that's mainly "behind the scenes" could be a way to go?

Kind of like an idyllic magical world of "high fantasy" but with "magic" being replaced with tech*?

*(as "magic" may be not exactly entirely feasible)
Click to expand...

This is one funny way of framing what I mean, but I don't feel like arguing against it so yeah, I absolutely mean that.

Dr. Plussy Pounder said:
If the issue was crowding and not isolation and hopelessness, why then is the problem so associated with isolation?

Why is it really fucking densely populated nations or cities have our issues with hyper atomization, ennui, meaninglessness, and the like?
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Because when you're surrounded by people at all times in all places, people who often aren't even people but ornaments for furniture like the bombonierres you bring home from weddings since you don't even interact with them in any meaningful way (sometimes, in no way at all). you want your time alone.
Of course, isolation of this kind is just the other extreme of the enforced crowding we're subjected to. Self-isolation eventually becomes a prison, but in fact it is initially conceived as a refuge from the mess outside.
 
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Save the Loli said:
Having unpaid labor/caregivers is exactly why family sizes were so big in the past and still are big in Africa. Some guy in Niger with four wives and fifty kids is living like a boss because each of those kids is doing work for him and when the kids are old enough, he'll make money (or get a bunch of cows) marrying them off. It was the same pretty much anywhere, especially parts of the world where people farmed on shitty land like Ireland, Scandinavia, or New England (Puritans had bigger families than other groups of early American settlers since their land sucked, I think only the Scots-Irish in Appalachia equalled them and go figure, their land sucked too).
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Meanwhile the kids totally aren't getting traumatized by being used as slave labor and getting married off to pedos and shit
 
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Save the Loli said:
Having unpaid labor/caregivers is exactly why family sizes were so big in the past and still are big in Africa. Some guy in Niger with four wives and fifty kids is living like a boss because each of those kids is doing work for him and when the kids are old enough, he'll make money (or get a bunch of cows) marrying them off. It was the same pretty much anywhere, especially parts of the world where people farmed on shitty land like Ireland, Scandinavia, or New England (Puritans had bigger families than other groups of early American settlers since their land sucked, I think only the Scots-Irish in Appalachia equalled them and go figure, their land sucked too).
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For real, look at countries like India. Having kids is a monetary incentive, and not because the state welfare will keep you alive.

You can actually get a lot of money for wedding one of your many children.
 
There is no good and bad parts of technology. There is technology full stop. Technology is fundamentally amoral - it does not matter that a car was made for driving, some people will still use it for killing. There is no way to avoid this. A society where individual humans are pious may be more resistent to behavior such as this, but all modern technology just invites "improper uses". For example, for an innovation to be made in medicine, you first have to understand why something stops working, and then you have to come up with a way to fix it. Then you have a cure. But to create a poison, you just need the first half. Just in trying to solve a problem you have created another much, much worse problem.

There is no preserving good and bad technology. There is rat utopia on the one hand and no post industrial technology on the other hand. People in the past always hated scientific innovations cause even though they were useful or profitable to some XYZ members of society, they drastically declined the QOL of other people. When mortars were invented in the 16th century, they were widely considered to be black magic. People who operated mortars were paid very well cause mortars were useful, but literally everyone despised them, and if things turned sour, there was a high chance some ally will come and backstab them if they got the chance.

If we compare to pros against the cons rather than just talking about the net gain/loss we will see that almost all technological advancement has been overwhelmingly negative. If at all possible, it is always better to err on the side of no innovation rather than more. Some progress will always happen, but it needs to be so slow that a really really long time needs to pass so people can decide if this innovation is actually improving their lives or not.

Destroy all technology.
 
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Homophobic white dog said:
Because when you're surrounded by people at all times in all places, people who often aren't even people but ornaments for furniture like the bombonierres you bring home from weddings since you don't even interact with them in any meaningful way (sometimes, in no way at all). you want your time alone.
Of course, isolation of this kind is just the other extreme of the enforced crowding we're subjected to. Self-isolation eventually becomes a prison, but in fact it is initially conceived as a refuge from the mess outside.
Click to expand...

Alienation can make you not like the people you're around, hence your desire to avoid them. I think you're mixed up cause and effect.
 
Dr. Plussy Pounder said:
Why is it really fucking densely populated nations or cities have our issues with hyper atomization, ennui, meaninglessness, and the like?
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I'm not sure there's a strong correlation there. Many Asian countries are ungodly dense, but (reportedly) have comparatively less struggles with feelings of isolation and meaninglessness than a country like the US, which is actually very sparsely populated outside of a few giant cities.
 
I forgot to say "don't" as in "don't have our issues."
 
ToroidalBoat said:
What if the tech could somehow be held at an arbitrary level, like always in the '00s, '90s, or '80s?

Or a "Butlerian Jihad" with tech like modern medicine and water purification, but no computers or AI?
Click to expand...
It would be an AI dictatorship where AI manipulates our culture to not value science/inventions (so good) and physically intervenes in anyone advancing technology. Or just one country/humans doing it and using a monopoly on some resource like energy (maybe ban all power plants and force everyone to use solar power beamed from space to a global energy grid) to force everyone to abolish technology and institute strict monitoring (so no data privacy).

There is no way to solve the problem of technology without destroying it entirely or living under some flavor of dictatorship/totalitarian society with no privacy. Pick your poison, do you want WEF, some other group of humans, or a godlike AI made by humans ruling over us? The latter is the least worst because theoretically the AI might not give a fuck what we do anymore than most people don't care about what their pets do as long as they don't do a few things they aren't supposed to.

The future will suck even more than the present.
 
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