[henrikschroder]

There are many dystopic future possibilities as automation eats jobs.

There's also a few positive ones, and I hope we can move towards them. One way would be to shift from taxation of human labour to taxation of the means of production. Another way is if access to quality of life products becomes so cheap that they require very little labour to earn.

If you extrapolate the progress of solar power, 3D printing, and synthetic meat, you can imagine a machine that is cheap to produce, but which would make each human completely self-sustainable. Not needing to work to put food on the table every single goddamn day would transform our society quite a lot in a positive way.

[bad_user]

I understand your angle, but relying on 3D printing and synthetic meat, probably from petroleum derivatives because 3D printing can't happen from thin air, in order to feed humans ... dude, to me that doesn't sound like a life that's worth living.

[henrikschroder]

Thin air contains all the carbon that plants get their bulk mass from...

Extrapolate further, imagine a machine that runs on solar power, and creates whatever food you want from water, carbon dioxide, and human poop. Essentially short-circuit the whole raise-crops-feed-cattle-slaughter-get-meat cycle. Make the food out of the machine perfectly nutricious as well, because why not.

There would still be things to strive for, to work for, if you want. But baseline survival is just taken care of. Sounds like a good future to me.

[bad_user]

In combination with sun light, the carbon taken from air provides the energy that plants need to grow, however plants also need minerals from a healthy soil.

When it comes to food, baseline survival is already taken care of in western countries and we are wasting about one third of the food we produce. It's not food that's the problem, but living space and forever rising health care costs.

But you know what the irony is? We don't know a thing about what constitutes a nutritious healthy diet, as the reductionist science we've been applying is not up for this task. Even more aggravating is that trying to shorten the "raise-crops-feed-cattle-slaughter-get-meat" cycle and do it on an industrial scale (by means of replacing sun's energy with fossil fuels and do it in concentrated operations) is precisely the root cause of many of the problems we find ourselves into.

As meddling with the things we ingest has given us the modern day diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease, not to mention that we're on the brink of going back to the dark ages due to the upcoming "antibiotics apocalypse".

And yet here you are, hoping that some future 3D printer will synthesize meat out of thin air, instead of fixing the real problems in our society, which is that we consume and waste too much from processes that aren't sustainable. But yeah, 3D printing will save us, seemed to work for Star Trek characters at least. Good luck with that mate.