[Tubelord]

Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug

[krapp]

A Star-Trek style "post-scarcity" economy can't exist in the real world. It depends on an impossible paradigmatic shift in basic human nature across the entire species (people just "evolve" beyond their base vices and desires such that they're willing to work purely for the sake of voluntarism and the betterment of humanity, there is no racism, no sexism, no struggles for power. *) and technology that violates basic physics (replicators, warp drives, transporters, etc.)

I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.

Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.

* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.

[xyzzy123]

From the perspective of pre-history, anyone living in a western country is in a post-scarcity society.

Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.

The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.

[cm2012]

Especially now that we have magic boxes to answer any question and speak any language

[krapp]

Yes, now that we have "magic boxes" replacing all of our knowledge workers and experts with inaccurate and half-hallucinated babble, deskilling an entire generation and gaslighting them into parasociality and schizophrenia it's just like Star Trek.

[SoftTalker]

Of course. I was just responding to the parent who was sad that AI isn't turning out to be "the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago." But that was always fantasy sci/fi anyway.