“The dream we can call Star Trek, the nightmare Mad Max.”
“Star Trek notes our remarkable technological advances and recognizes we are hurtling towards a post-scarcity economy. Mad Max reminds us our depredations of the planet may prove untenable and the Earth might just bite back.”
“Your family and mine alone consume as much energy as all of humanity put together did during the Middle Ages. The oceans are acidifying, the planet is heating up, 30 to 50 percent of all species may be extinct by the middle of this century. The last time so many species died, an asteroid hit the planet. Today, that asteroid is us. Its velocity began 10,000 years ago when man invented agriculture. With the Industrial Revolution, its speed grew exponentially. Every day, the impact crater gobbles up a bigger share of Earth’s bounty and we are sensible to fear that some day, the planet will strike back.”
“Our prosperity requires productivity growth: technological advances that continue to allow us to make goods and services more cheaply. Star Trek is the extrapolation of this trend. If it costs hardly anything to produce goods, then everyone can afford almost everything. In Star Trek, the whole Federation is as affluent as upper middle class Americans today and they get longer vacations. You no longer have to work much to satisfy your needs. Star Trek is socialism by unlimited technological supply, no violent uprising against the marketplace required.”
“Technological progress can create dystopia even if ecological disaster is avoided. What if the benefits of productivity gains are monopolized by the top one percent, as they largely have been for most of the past 30 years? This is the world of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a terrifying, but familiar world of gated communities and genetic engineering, with generalized poverty for everyone outside the corporate elite.”
“Average adult human height, an excellent proxy for childhood nutrition, only returned to Palaeolithic levels in the late 19th century. Hierarchy, slavery, and oppression — all of these emerged only in the wake of agriculture. Before that revolution, we might hunt cooperatively a few hours a week, gather berries for a few more, and spend the rest of our time amusing each other telling stories. Work before farming resembles what the rich do on holiday today.”
“Subsistence farmers worked far longer hours than their ancestors. They died younger and lived more miserable lives. The sole upside was that farming allowed the same plot of land to feed many more people. Agriculturalists took over the planet because they had more children, not because their lifestyle was more attractive. If health and happiness are the measures by which we assess the quality of human life, then the agricultural revolution was a peerless disaster in our history.”
“If jobs keep disappearing, and we do not institute a basic income guarantee, then we may have the cruellest irony imaginable: a marketplace of unlimited supply without consumers capable of shopping.”