Replicators in every home and on every street corner.
Transporter stations every 3 blocks.
What if someone asked you to be King or Queen of the World? Would you say yes?
- Thread starter Jayson1
- Start date
Replicators in every home and on every street corner.
Transporter stations every 3 blocks.
What about those who don’t have a home of their own? What of those living in shared accommodation, saving their burger flipping wage for deposit on their own place? Suddenly, no one buys burgers anymore, but they still have rent to pay. What about the land lord relying on the rent to cover their own costs?
Well if you had a God who gave humans everything they needed we wouldn't need replicators or any kind of government. Maybe transporters for travel just for fun. You could also give humans the ability to explore space and give them the option of longer lifespans if they wanted. A God could in theory make humans almost into Gods themselves if he/she wanted to.
Jason
Jason
Everyone would have a home and money would no longer be needed if you had a more active God. Only thing is if your God you don't tell the people you are God because you don't want them to worship you. Not sure how you would turn earth into a paradise without people wondering how it happened. Even paradise would seem scary to people without any clue as to why it happened. First thought might be to a God and if people knew God on that level you would I think have intense fear that they aren't living up to his/her standards and then comes to the sacrfices to please this new God. I think God works better with people even if God is real by being a unknown mystery you don't know for sure is real until you die. Granted if you give people the option of never dying though then that answer would never be answered and then you got immortal human with no clues about his/her new ability. Also if you don't tell someone how would they know they were immortal? I'm guessing if you still look like you do today but it's 30 years later you begin to suspect things. But simply never dying would take longer for people to figure out unless they survived some terrible accident and even then they would most likely write it off as some fluke luck.
Jason
There is no rent. Apartment blocks are built everywhere and if you suck at life you get a nice apartment to live in forever with no bills and a replicator in the wall. If you work hard you get a beachside villa. But you don't have to work to have shelter, food and free transport anywhere in the world.
Like I said, socialism
I’m not being argumentative, just playing with the logistics.
I want the beach villa so I’ll work hard. But my job wouldn’t exist in a world without money, or maybe it would, and I could work on pet IT projects to my hearts content, but without the financial pressures driving deadlines, it would be difficult to call my work hard. Would I still get the villa?
Many hands make light work as they say. Are there enough villas for everyone that’s prepared to work hard, and is there enough work to go round.
I could be the caretaker at a school instead, for example, that would be hard, but with a hundred assistants chipping in to earn their own beach villa, I could put my feet up while everyone else did what ever work that might arise. Would I still get the beach villa?
What constitutes hard work, and how do you rank contribution and effort?
How much coastline is there.. if everyone got a beach villa.
I wonder how controlled the coastline is. Could you find a nice place within hiking distance from a transporter, bring along your portable replicator and your emergency hut and just chill out for 10 years? Would someone come along and tell you that you have no right to the beach because you're not working to better yourself?
Or maybe if that beach is needed for the people that work hard.
Instant replicated food is a great idea but beer never tastes so good as when you’ve worked for it. Whether it’s a self pulled pint in the pub you’ve just spent the last 6 hours stood pulling pints for everyone else, or if it’s a pint at the end of a perilous descent down a dark mountain without a torch, it’s so much better than just having one when you want.
Coffee too tastes better when you grind the beans by hand with a pestle and mortar than it ever could in Starbucks.
I get a lot of joy from building miniatures. With a replicator, I could have all the materials and tools I could ever want, or I could just replicate the thing I want in miniature.
Replicator tech would leave a lot of bored people with a world full of unsatisfactory experiences. Like how nobody that lives near a thing of interest ever bothers to visit the attraction unless they have a visitor from out of town. Instant transport to anywhere in the world would make the world small and boring.
People need purpose. Remember what happened to the original matrix, whole crops were lost.
Instant replicated food is a great idea but beer never tastes so good as when you’ve worked for it. Whether it’s a self pulled pint in the pub you’ve just spent the last 6 hours stood pulling pints for everyone else, or if it’s a pint at the end of a perilous descent down a dark mountain without a torch, it’s so much better than just having one when you want.
Coffee too tastes better when you grind the beans by hand with a pestle and mortar than it ever could in Starbucks.
I get a lot of joy from building miniatures. With a replicator, I could have all the materials and tools I could ever want, or I could just replicate the thing I want in miniature.
Replicator tech would leave a lot of bored people with a world full of unsatisfactory experiences. Like how nobody that lives near a thing of interest ever bothers to visit the attraction unless they have a visitor from out of town. Instant transport to anywhere in the world would make the world small and boring.
People need purpose. Remember what happened to the original matrix, whole crops were lost.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Myself? My first instinct is... yes.Not for power or control or money or endless whatever. Just to try and do right by the world. But see, my very first idea would be to shoot all the billionaires for a start.
On slightly longer consideration, a couple minutes, probably no. @Jayson1 read Machiavelli's The Prince. I've not, actually, but I had an intense exercise with someone who had, who started with, 'Okay, you're Prince of the city. And these conditions have arisen. How do you handle them?" And My God, the twists and turns! It wasn't like Machiavelli said anything outrageous, au contraire, most situations mentioned would be all too likely. So there's that.
And then there's this passage from Pratchett's Men At Arms (apologies for length):
It was nearly noon. Sergeant Colon had taken the new recruits down to the archery butts in Butts Treat.
Vimes went on patrol with Carrot.
He felt something inside him bubbling over. Something was brushing the tips of his corroded but nevertheless still-active instincts, trying to draw attention to itself. He had to be on the move. It was all that Carrot could do to keep up.
There were trainee Assassins in the streets around the Guild, still sweeping up debris.
Assassins in daylight,' snarled Vimes. 'I'm amazed they don't turn to dust.'
'That's vampires, sir,' said Carrot.
'Hah! You're right. Assassins and licensed thieves and bloody vampires! You know, this was a great old city once, lad.'
Unconsciously, they fell into step . . . proceeding.
'When we had kings, sir?'
'Kings? Kings? Hell, no!'
A couple of Assassins looked around in surprise.
'I'll tell you,' said Vimes. A monarch's an absolute ruler, right? The head honcho—'
'Unless he's a queen,' said Carrot.
Vimes glared at him, and then nodded.
'OK, or the head honchette—'
'No, that'd only apply if she was a young woman. Queens tend to be older. She'd have to be a . . . a honcharina? No, that's for very young princesses. No. Um. A honchesa, I think.'
Vimes paused. There's something in the air in this city, he thought. If the Creator had said, 'Let there be light' in Ankh-Morpork, he'd have got no further because of all the people saying 'What colour?'
'The supreme ruler, OK,' he said, starting to stroll forward again.
'OK.'
'But that's not right, see? One man with the power of life and death.'
'But if he's a good man—' Carrot began.
'What? What? OK. OK. Let's believe he's a good man. But his second-in-command – is he a good man too? You'd better hope so. Because he's the supreme ruler, too, in the name of the king. And the rest of the court . . . they've got to be good men. Because if just one of them's a bad man the result is bribery and patronage.'
'The Patrician's a supreme ruler,' Carrot pointed out. He nodded at a passing troll.
'G'day, Mr Carbuncle.'
'But he doesn't wear a crown or sit on a throne and he doesn't tell you it's right that he should rule,' said Vimes. 'I hate the bastard. But he's honest. Honest like a corkscrew.'
'Even so, a good man as king—'
'Yes? And then what? Royalty pollutes people's minds, boy. Honest men start bowing and bobbing just because someone's grandad was a bigger murdering bastard than theirs was. Listen! We probably had good kings, once! But kings breed other kings! And blood tells, and you end up with a bunch of arrogant, murdering bastards! Chopping off queens' heads and fighting their cousins every five minutes! And we had centuries of that! And then one day a man said "No more kings!" and we rose up and we fought the bloody nobles and we dragged the king off his throne and we dragged him into Sator Square and we chopped his bloody head off! Job well done!'
'Wow,' said Carrot. 'Who was he?'
'Who?'
'The man who said "No More Kings".'
People were staring. Vimes' face went from the red of anger to the red of embarrassment. There was little difference in the shading, however.
'Oh . . . he was Commander of the City Guard in those days,' he mumbled. 'They called him Old Stoneface.'
'Never heard of him,' said Carrot.
'He, er, doesn't appear much in the history books,' said Vimes. 'Sometimes there has to be a civil war, and sometimes, afterwards, it's best to pretend something didn't happen. Sometimes people have to do a job, and then they have to be forgotten. He wielded the axe, you know. No-one else'd do it. It was a king's neck, after all. Kings are,' he spat the word, 'special. Even after they'd seen the . . . private rooms, and cleaned up the . . . bits. Even then. No-one'd clean up the world. But he took the axe and cursed them all and did it.'
'What king was it?' said Carrot.
'Lorenzo the Kind,' said Vimes, distantly.
'I've seen his picture in the palace museum,' said Carrot. A fat old man. Surrounded by lots of children.'
'Oh yes,' said Vimes, carefully. 'He was very fond of children.'
Carrot waved at a couple of dwarfs.
'I didn't know this,' he said. 'I thought there was just some wicked rebellion or something.'
Vimes shrugged. 'It's in the history books, if you know where to look.'
In answer to the original question:
I could be a God. First, subdivide myself into 24 identical mes (hey if the Xtian god can be three in one, I can be 24) so I only have to do god work for an hour a day. Me’s will recombine with prime me once per day to redistribute experiences, assuring we all remain the same.
2nd, make with the smiting. LOTS of muthafuckas gon’ git smited. I have a list. No more guessing, people are gonna KNOW when God is pissed at folks. Certain things will just get you auto-fragged by a bolt from above.
3rd, there’s a lotta bad stuff that goes down that’s got nothing to do with free will. That shit’s done. We ain’t giving little kids spina bifida an shit anymore.
4th, stuff that’s good for you now tastes like stuff that is bad for you, and vice-versa. You now hate candy and love broccoli. Makes it a lot easier to eat well.
Maybe I’ll send all our current excess of CO2 to Mars. Maybe not. You people need some incentive to make that change yourself, but it’s quite possible that the Step 2 smitefest will take care of a lot of the obstacles to doing that. Maybe I’ll just tweak the laws of probability a bit for folks working towards goals I approve of. Hey look, scientific and exploratory space packages always work flawlessly, and come in on time and under budget. What a coincidence!
In conclusion, I should probably not ever be given temporal power of any kind.
2nd, make with the smiting. LOTS of muthafuckas gon’ git smited. I have a list. No more guessing, people are gonna KNOW when God is pissed at folks. Certain things will just get you auto-fragged by a bolt from above.
3rd, there’s a lotta bad stuff that goes down that’s got nothing to do with free will. That shit’s done. We ain’t giving little kids spina bifida an shit anymore.
4th, stuff that’s good for you now tastes like stuff that is bad for you, and vice-versa. You now hate candy and love broccoli. Makes it a lot easier to eat well.
Maybe I’ll send all our current excess of CO2 to Mars. Maybe not. You people need some incentive to make that change yourself, but it’s quite possible that the Step 2 smitefest will take care of a lot of the obstacles to doing that. Maybe I’ll just tweak the laws of probability a bit for folks working towards goals I approve of. Hey look, scientific and exploratory space packages always work flawlessly, and come in on time and under budget. What a coincidence!
In conclusion, I should probably not ever be given temporal power of any kind.
Oh no, just a thing that it unlikely to come from a king or queen,
@teacake would be corrupted by the power, her ideals made a mockery of as the proletariat increasingly became a means to cement her power base, tools to further goals that started out as ways of bettering their lives.
She'd become a (Spot whispers , in horror, as though uttering the language of Mordor) ....a Tory
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Kings and Queens become kings and queens for life. No term-limits. And their power has been reduced to the point of figurehead. I wouldn't want to be a King because I'd be nothing but a figurehead and a public figure. What goes with being a public figure is a total loss of personal freedom and privacy because I'd never be able to go anywhere by myself without being seen and harassed by someone.
So, it doesn't really work. At least not in this century. 1,000 years ago? Maybe that might've been different. I'd have tried to have been as benevolent as possible.
So, it doesn't really work. At least not in this century. 1,000 years ago? Maybe that might've been different. I'd have tried to have been as benevolent as possible.
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