Extinction.

Humanity might go extinct extremely quickly. The unnecessary centralization to central-western European and North American countries will inevitably lead to extinction of the human kind. We are now facing two possible outcomes of current trends: a) humanity completely splinters into rich & poor, and the poor die off b) humanity decentralizes and keeps growing in numbers, then starts colonizing space a: What will inevitably happen is that once the lower 'classes' start dying off (already happening) those remaining will for a while be under pressure of the shrinking global economy until the trend stops and there are a couple of million people left on the planet. At which point most of natural human instincts cease to function because most hardships are automated away. Progress halts until the point at which the species dies off with a whimper. b: Is what I've decided to be my purpose, in short. I need to invent some way for you to buy your breakfast eggs from your neighbour. That way we create jobs, stimulate local demand, and prevent unnecessarily wasteful supermarket economy/logistics the current economy operates on. How? No idea yet.

>>13169 The original concept of capitalism is, as I understand it, that everyone had something to offer and people would just exchange capital for products and services. In retrospect, this is a naïve view, especially in light of Western implementations of capitalism which encourage a winner-take-all view as well as a growth-above-all view. If citizens could buy and sell directly from one another, you would just be resetting the problem. In the movie Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos solves the universe's overpopulation by removing 50% of it. The problem is that doesn't solve the ongoing dynamic of growth that led to overpopulation in the first place. In a likewise fashion, creating a system whereby citizens buy and sell from each other without any centralized authority doesn't solve the inherent tendency of entrepreneurs to find ways to centralize the process. After all, things become more efficient when the process is centralized. In addition money creates influence through transactional power, so there will be an inherent desire to control as much of it as possible. Rather than create a new system from scratch, I would suggest looking at the current system and noting at least one point that could result in catastrophic failure (like anything that caused the 2008 Recession). Then, design a new, similar system that accounts for this problem. Go back to the current system and note another point of catastrophic failure and redesign the new system to take that into account as well. Continue to do this until you have a system that provides a good balance between operation and failure. Once you are done, take a moment to sit back and contemplate the fact that momentum is a bitch and no one will want to adopt your system because it is too different from what they already know.

>>13173 Are you trying to say that decentralization does not solve inevitable centralization? In other words are you saying centralization is unavoidable?

Im pretty sure humanity will evolve and most will devolve. Looking at how most of humanity becomes degenerate to the point they can barely live even with technology it doesnt take a genius to figure out where that will go. On the other hand some people have and will gain enormous advantages that split off from main society. There is also a factor to consider whetever artificial or alien life will become the dominant life on this planet, once something threatens mankinds position in the foodchain it wont take long for it to take over.

>>13173 >In the movie Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos solves the universe's overpopulation by removing 50% of it Opinion directly discarded and didn't continue reading any further Anyone who takes political opinions from pop culture movies is a nobody and should be laughed at

>>13176 pic related

imho option b starts when some group of 10+ 'hackerspace's join up and start an anarchist space junk collection team. it'll be like what you expected to see when you saw the cover of PLANETES

what you exactly mean by "really quick"? i don't see a happening any time soon

>>13174 Creating a decentralized system and leaving it at that doesn't take into account human nature in terms of greed, power, ignorance, complacency and complicity. Look at the Internet. It was initially conceived as a communications system that could survive a nuclear strike. Despite this, I recall a news article where New York went offline when some provider's network had a freak-out. There was also that time when China's border routers went nuts and DDOS'd a section of the global network Most recently, Facebook went offline and a news article popped up about how businesses that ran ads on Facebook lost a ton of money. This is relevant because in some countries Facebook is almost synonymous with "The Internet" Decentralization alone is not enough. Someone will always try to co-opt the system to gain an advantage, especially if people stop paying attention. People are easy to trick in this sense. If things have been going well before, people expect this to continue and get surprised when they discover this is wrong. I remember an interview with a fisherman on some news site; the fisherman wasn't worried about overfishing some species of fish because he figured he could just move on to the next species. Fish have always existed, so he couldn't imagine overfishing to the point of nothing left. The decentralization/centralization problem is a human one, not a technical one.

>>13176 >>13177 You know what? You are both right. I shouldn't have added that bit about The Avengers. It was at the top of my mind for some reason and I went with it. I think the rest of the post is reasonable, however.

>>13187 You're talking politics. I'm talking sociology + technology. I'm talking replacing overpriced taxi services with uber. Replacing hotels with airbnb. Replacing the supermarket with goods from your local community. Replacing amazon/ebay with your local retailer. For example.

>>13190 It's not completely politics although I'm not sure why politics should not be taken into account. >replacing overpriced taxi services with uber. Uber has been found to violate multiple laws and engage in anti-competitive practices. Uber drivers have assaulted passengers and Uber as a company used apps to trick politicians into thinking they were adhering to positive ethic practices. Assume Uber never existed and you were able to create multiple Uber-like companies. What would stop one of them from trying the same thing or just merging with a competitor to squeeze competition out of the market? This is a failure point that needs to be considered. >Replacing hotels with airbnb. Difficult, at best. Hotels offer so much more than rooms for rent. Conventions, meetings and other events can all be had at hotels. AirBnB only offers someone's home while they are away. Also, I understand that some cities are taking a hard look at controlling AirBnB's growth. Politics will always interfere with living spaces. >Replacing the supermarket with goods from your local community. You'll run into regulatory issues pretty fast. For example I once pondered why restaurants don't donate their unused food to the homeless. It was pointed out to me that if someone had an allergic reaction from the food, the restaurant would be liable. Grocery stores likewise have to deal with liability and are regularly evaluated to lower chances of something like an E. Coli outbreak. >Replacing amazon/ebay with your local retailer. I'd really like that. The problem here is scale. Amazon grew because America alone needs things in large quantities at a neccessarily low price point. It's not just laziness, either. America has a population of around 400 million or so. To supply a population that size with goods of reasonable quality requires the ability to produce a high volume at a reasonably low price. A centralized organization becomes an easy choice. Don't get me wrong; I would love Amazon to be taken down. The fact is, however, that buying local can't compete on price and volume for a lot of things. I get what you're trying to do and I wish you luck, but there are a lot of factors to consider, here.

In hunter-gatherer societies, the link between sex and procreation is so obvious as to go without saying. The further we move from nature, the more tenuous this link becomes. Our 'advancements', both technological and social - condoms, birth control pills, abortion, PReP, lube, antibiotics, gay pride - serve to separate sexual pleasure from reproduction. We are materially richer than we've ever been, yet a responsible citizen is supposed to plan out each child, if they have children at all. As a result, every first-world country is already below replacement fertility, and the rest are following down the same path. By the end of this century every nation will be below replacement fertility, and technological and social development will only accelerate. This is the Great Filter that will cause our extinction. I guess you could view this in terms of centralisation, as technological development is accompanied by greater centralisation. But the root cause is the separation of sex and reproduction.

>AirBnB only offers someone's home while they are away. In my experience it's a good 50% people who rent out an empty room because airbnb makes more than a roommate would while being present. I've used it extensively and ended up hanging out and eating together with the host. Personally exactly what makes it more interesting than hotel - you actually get to interact with local people.

>>13301 >We are materially richer than we've ever been You got more electronic toys but in terms of wealth you are way poorer than people 50 years ago. Adjusted you could earn part time at a gas station more than a tenured university seat can earn today. I think everything else is just rooted in this. It's no surprise most people feel not as confident starting a family when they don't even earn 1/3 of the money as before. This also is reflected in how the market changed. Many sectors changed from catering to a middle class to offering the cheapest options to the poor and luxury for a few while stores trying to address the middle went into decline.

I believe there is a scarier third option: stagnation. We become entrapped by the system that teaches us to enjoy our slavery soon after already having made us ignorant of this trap

>>13169 Considering that levels of class division have been greater in the past, than they even are today, and yet, we've still had 12,000 years of civilization progress (and unprecedented rate of progress since the Renaissance), I think you're erroneous and egregiously naive. Remember, we've literally had monarchs and emperors have been thought of themselves, and have been treated like gods, Mesoamerica was built upon such ideals (paving your temples with the skulls of the proletariat). So nope, I think we'll be just fine, save an unforeseen nuclear war due to error in brinkmanship.

>>13180 >t. I don't know the cost of spaceflight

>>13175 >... and most will devolve. You can't devolve, even "dysgenic evolution" is still evolution.

>>13169 >What will inevitably happen is that once the lower 'classes' start dying off (already happening) those remaining will for a while be under pressure of the shrinking global economy until the trend stops and there are a couple of million people left on the planet. So, I guess we've never heard of plague? Or even an event even more catastrophic than that, like a mass extinction event? You do know that non-Sub-Saharan African populations are only descended from a very small group, right? >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Eurasia#Population_bottleneck

>>13301 Uh, no, as sure first-world countries might be below replacement levels, but there are other countries who are booming in terms of population. So, I don't think that will cause the extinction of the human race. And let's say, for argument's sake, that we don't mix with those other populations (for some bizarre ad hoc reason), they'll just fill the gap left by the disappearance of East Asian and European populations. In other words, it'll form a cycle.

>>13310 >>13311 The degeneration of mankind from overpopulation is already something scientists are planning for. As population declines, general management jobs that keep the world running smoothly start to loose their ability to control the entire system resulting in absolute chaos quite rapidly. Think of it this way: Food, consumable items, and other products are designed, built, and sold to meet a need. throw a wrench into the system at any stage (factory-transport-warehouse-sales point-consumer) and the entire system collapses. where this gets dangerous is in the food and energy sectors, without well trained blue collar workers to commit to working on energy production and distribution, the infrastructure for a system fails, which means medical support, commerce, and communication become exponentially more difficult as time goes on, which resonates over other industries. The food system is heavily tech reliant. GPS-chemcorp-gene modified-and chemical resistant crops and fertilizers are used to produce a majority of the food in industrialized nations. Look at cuba when the USSR collapsed, the average person lost around 10kg of weight IIRC becasue of food shortages, and it took years for them to find ways to make up for shortages in chemical products and go back to traditional farming (homogeneous cuban community was instrumental to survival, and many cubans say that if something like that were to happen in the united states, they would not be able to create a good socialist system to overcome the hardships). Because of a potential mass die off, scientists have proposed a number of ways of warning future generations of hazards posed by present humanity, including special long term memory storage with data on nuclear waste that will be there for tens of thousands of years, and other industrial hazards. There are some comfy architectural designs to deal with the inevitable end of humanity, however that may come. While space colonization sounds good, humans would likely die off within 3 generations, because reproduction in 0-G and cosmic/solar radiation will likely produce sickly/handicapped offspring. AI would seem promising to carry on the legacy of mankind, but it would not exactly be human. Data suggests mass die offs in 50 years from climate migration (too many people for an areas food/water supply will cause migration or wars, which will pull other countries into the struggle by using up their resources, or just taking them from others, no continent is safe, also because of this piracy and organized crime just like in peoples cyberpunk LARPs may become a reality).

>>13327 >The degeneration of mankind from overpopulation is already something scientists are planning for. As population declines, general management jobs that keep the world running smoothly start to loose their ability to control the entire system resulting in absolute chaos quite rapidly. What "scientists"? Are you gonna quote sources for any of these crazy speculation? Why would a decreasing population weaken management jobs? Surely a smaller population is easier to control? >Think of it this way: Food, consumable items, and other products are designed, built, and sold to meet a need. throw a wrench into the system at any stage (factory-transport-warehouse-sales point-consumer) and the entire system collapses. where this gets dangerous is in the food and energy sectors, without well trained blue collar workers to commit to working on energy production and distribution, the infrastructure for a system fails, which means medical support, commerce, and communication become exponentially more difficult as time goes on, which resonates over other industries. Humanity has gone thru much worse than a population decline like this, stop presuming our systems are just waiting to collapse into CHAOS. >The food system is heavily tech reliant. GPS-chemcorp-gene modified-and chemical resistant crops and fertilizers are used to produce a majority of the food in industrialized nations. Look at cuba when the USSR collapsed, the average person lost around 10kg of weight IIRC becasue of food shortages, and it took years for them to find ways to make up for shortages in chemical products and go back to traditional farming (homogeneous cuban community was instrumental to survival, and many cubans say that if something like that were to happen in the united states, they would not be able to create a good socialist system to overcome the hardships). If even those retarded commies living on a small island were able to do just fine after a massive blow to their economy why do you presume humanity (now with a lot less mouths to feed and still the same area to farm) won't do swell? >Because of a potential mass die off, scientists have proposed a number of ways of warning future generations of hazards posed by present humanity, including special long term memory storage with data on nuclear waste that will be there for tens of thousands of years, and other industrial hazards. There are some comfy architectural designs to deal with the inevitable end of humanity, however that may come. Again, what fuarrrking scientists? Stop using these basic ass appeals to authority like a 12 year old. >While space colonization sounds good, humans would likely die off within 3 generations, because reproduction in 0-G and cosmic/solar radiation will likely produce sickly/handicapped offspring. AI would seem promising to carry on the legacy of mankind, but it would not exactly be human. As I understand it the low gravity shouldn't be a problem for a permanently space borne organism and the solar radiation is easily mitigated. >Data suggests mass die offs in 50 years from climate migration (too many people for an areas food/water supply will cause migration or wars, which will pull other countries into the struggle by using up their resources, or just taking them from others, no continent is safe, also because of this piracy and organized crime just like in peoples cyberpunk LARPs may become a reality). Again, what fuarrrking data? You can't just make these extra-ordinaries claims and not fuarrrking back them up. You do fuarrrking realize all of that stuff you listed has been happening for as long as humans have existed, right? I highly suggest you don't post about stuff you know soykaf all about and act so fuarrrking smuggly like you've got it all figured out, you're gonna save the fuarrrking human race.

>>13330 >As I understand it the low gravity shouldn't be a problem for a permanently space borne organism and the solar radiation is easily mitigated. neither of these are true. There is no data about whether humans can even reproduce in space, many organisms can't.

>>13331 Solar radiation is pretty easily mitigated by colonizing a planet with a strong magnetic field. Same goes for low gravity. You first state my claims are untrue but immediately go on to admit there's no data on it, so which is it?

>>13332 We were talking about living in space, not on a planet. Totally different things.

>>13334 >We were talking about living in space, not on a planet. >While space colonization sounds good No we are not, space colonization implies a taking of suitable land, that's what colonization is. Why would we choose to live in 0g when there are a ton of free planets around with a ton of resources up for the taking??

>>13338 Not without FTL or terraforming there aren't.

>>13330 Sorry lain, i was pretty sleep deprived when I wrote that, so i will gladly clarify >What "scientists"? Are you gonna quote sources for any of these crazy speculation? Department of Defense, Department of Homeland security, NOAA and several independant think tanks. I can post some sources once I get back to my hard drive. One might say they are talking about global collapse as a mere thouht experiment, or to try to get taxpayer gibs, but there are some valid points about worst-case and what is most likely to happen. Why would a decreasing population weaken management jobs? Surely a smaller population is easier to control? I meand it to mean management *of* jobs (as a society). People with trade skills are already lacking in many places, becasue blue colar work only goes into the tech industry or high value jobs that are avaiable becasue of tech. Without jobs that manage infrastructure (or synthetic substitutes like it looks like japan is trying to do with robots for everything) people will reach a black hole of technology, where tap and die makers and machinists who can work by hand instead of with CAD software will become highly sought after (this assumes that other forms of advanced technology become unusable because of circumstances related to rapid population decline). >Humanity has gone thru much worse than a population decline like this, stop presuming our systems are just waiting to collapse into CHAOS. Chaos is a hard thing to explain, and it means different things for many different people. to most, a disruption of life is enough to offset the balance of normalacy of society as a whole. Although people make a big deal about it, look at the effects of a snow storm on an area where it generally does not happen. Look at countries where natural disasters destroy almost all of the infrastructure. Once sanitation goes, disease gets worse, overtaxes medical systems, and then human patterns get disrupted. >If even those retarded commies living on a small island were able to do just fine after a massive blow to their economy why do you presume humanity (now with a lot less mouths to feed and still the same area to farm) won't do swell? The problem is a more sociological one, and the cubans were successful becasue of their homogeniety. Places like japan would probably experience a similar outcome, but very segregated areas of the United States for example would amplify social discord. Look at case studies for hurricane katrina, where poor resource allocation meant that there was virtually no law for an extended period. I have seen cities where after a three day loss of power, people started looting and price gouging gasoline instead of trying to overcome problems together as a community. Those "retarded commies" at least did not try murdering and robbing one another a mere 48 hours after a natural disaster (though in the United States this is actually the case). >Again, what fuarrrking scientists? Stop using these basic ass appeals to authority like a 12 year old. There are numerous failsafes in the event of global catastrophe. Arctic seed banks, and the European Union and several of their american counterparts have discussed how to warn future generations of the dangers of our pollutants, specifically Nuclear waste. Most of their examples assume that in 10000 years humanity might not be around in its present state, so fail-safes need to be implemented to convey danger and get people to avoid hazard sites. In the grand scheme of human civilization, 10000 is not a long time. As for the zero gravity and radiation damage to cells, there is more research needed to determine the survival rates of organisms. Without a magnetosphere or extremely sophisticated shielding, extensive damage is likely to occur, but the long term outcomes of space exposure are not fully understood. >Again, what fuarrrking data? You can't just make these extra-ordinaries claims and not fuarrrking back them up. You do fuarrrking realize all of that stuff you listed has been happening for as long as humans have existed, right? I can't remember the exact study, but a research organization plotted thousands of data points and determined that based on current resource consumption trends versus birth rates, at least something major was going to happen to the human population (assuming no wonder science is introduced to raise the carrying capacity of many regions, the outcomes are not good). You can find plenty of articles about climate/water war, which was discussed decades ago, but has come to the forefront of many nations because of the correlation between armed conflict and lack of basic resources like food and water. Growing trends in resource consumption illustrate how conflict will emerge because of source depletion (and we still cannot turn fuel into food directly). Most food supplies require immense allocation of water for growing and fuel for operating machinery and chemicals for controlling growth. The university of purdue iirc talked about the threat to agriculture because of megacorps standardizing entire crops that are grown in bulk on millions of square km of land. because all of the crops have virtually no biodiversity, a disease could destroy the food supply of billions of people over a matter of months or years. Urbanization also presents problems, because it situates many people into close proximity of one another, and things like food will usually be depleted within weeks or months following a disaster. The middle east demonstrates this point well, because once trade with other nations mostly stopped, food import could not sustain the population that had grown beyond its means, causing people to flee or die off. More information on the population complications of megacities from the United States army university https://mwi.usma.edu/objective-metropolis-future-dense-urban-operational-environments/

>>13169 >The unnecessary centralization to central-western European and North American countries will inevitably lead to extinction of the human kind. Why? >a) humanity completely splinters into rich & poor, and the poor die off Why do you think this? Sounds retarded to me. Poverty, violent crime, etc. are decreasing globally. Living standards are rising everywhere. >What will inevitably happen is that once the lower 'classes' start dying off (already happening) those remaining will for a while be under pressure of the shrinking global economy until the trend stops and there are a couple of million people left on the planet. Wut >At which point most of natural human instincts cease to function because most hardships are automated away. Progress halts until the point at which the species dies off with a whimper. None of these things have happened with current technology, why should they happen with new technology?

>once the lower 'classes' start dying off (already happening) They're not though. Those starving africans everybody thought were going to die off in the '90s are now walking around with iphones. Maybe there's some americans dying from fentanyl, but there has always been something (aids, polio, vietnam etc.) killing off gobs of people, and there likely always will be. >>13187 Your mistake is you seem to think there is some stable end state we need to get to and then all the problems will go away. That is never going to happen. The world is always in flux. No matter what system you might implement, some clever individual will figure out how to circumvent it and use it for their personal gain. That isn't a flaw, that's how we make progress. What people don't seem to realize is that these huge centralized corporations tend to be incredibly brittle. Companies like IBM and GE didn't lose their stranglehold on the market due to government intervention (if that were the case they would have only needed to bribe the right people) but because they became corrupt and unable to adapt to changing conditions. This happens slowly so people think these corporations last forever, but keep in mind facebook is less than 20 years old.

>>13169 Central banks and addiction funnels like imageboards, forums, and social media in general. Yeet yeet

>overpopulation Stop. Malthusianism is 19th century idiocy with no basis in reality, Neo-Malthusianism is propaganda. Population growth is a non-issue, as long as the infrastructure keeps up. People need food, homes, schools, roads, hospitals and so on but we can build all of that, it's not a problem. We have the people, we have the resources and we have the money. There's close to 2000 billionaires in the world right now. Let's redistribute 90% of their wealth and build all of the infrastructure we need - they'll still be obscenely rich so why not?

>>13657 >Stop. Malthusianism is 19th century idiocy with no basis in reality, Neo-Malthusianism is propaganda. Population growth is a non-issue, pic related >, as long as the infrastructure keeps up. but it can't, humans keep reproducing assuming infinate growth and technology will evolve to keep us all alive

>I need to invent some way for you to buy your breakfast eggs from your neighbour. It's called "paying money" and it was invented a while ago. Seriously, what do you want to do, invent an app for that?

>>13658 >infinite growth No. Human population will reach around 11 billion in 2100 and then basically flatline. The growth rate has been declining globally since the 60s, it's barely at 1%/year now, it's complete a non-issue. Malthus, the 19th century lunatic behind this entire theory, predicted that humanity would run out of food around 1850 and yet, here we are. So why do people still believe this nonsense?

>>13659 I think OP was saying he needs to invent a way to decentralize economic production in an efficient manner. Local production as the dominant source of all goods would topple the current socioeconomic hierarchy and help us all get along better. Or something like that.

>>13672 The problem is everyone lives in super packed cities now, so you either need a transportation method to bring food from small farmers at a low cost, or you move to the countryside.