Try to think of something advanced but theoretically possible that would rapidly proliferate. No weapons.
My first thought was some kind of farm tech leading to a second agricultural revolution, allowing AES countries to thrive despite sanctions. Some leap forward in permaculture or vertical farms or whatever.
Another idea was a breakthrough in cryptography makings comms be completely anonymous, giving insurgent movements a more even playing field.
A virus that causes radical behavioral modification. More empathy. less aggression. More interpersonal curiosity. A tendency towards sharing. A desire for physical proximity. Short incubation period, long infectious period, R value 20+, aerosol spread.
Who was that guy who got within a few days of dumping several million doses of LSD in to the LA water supply?
All of them tbh. It's not the tech that makes the system but the way it's implemented within it. The PC, the internet, mobile telephony, all have changed the way we live and yet havent brought about the end of capitalism.
The only way to have full equality under capitalism is to have full nuclear proliferation on an individual level
Try to think of something advanced but theoretically possible that would rapidly proliferate. No weapons.
I'm not convinced our problems are scarcity driven, so I don't see that solving scarcity would address what's wrong with our current society.
I’m not convinced our problems are scarcity driven
they're greed driven. greed creates the scarcity
The means of production but pocket sized and easy to replicate and pass on to someone else
Or maybe just renewable energy that's easy to generate in large quantities and is easy to get set up without capital
The replicator from Star Trek + it can replicate its own renewable energy generators from CO2 + renewable sources.
Basically... something that removes the need for basically any labor for all necessities.
Decently put together cryptography is already virtually unbreakable, at least until the :cia: get their hands on a usable quantum computer, so at least 5 or 10 years. The reason encrypted messages get compromised is almost always the parts before and after the message gets encrypted.
That's actually why WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Briar all offer differing degrees of security despite them all being end-to-end encrypted
Decently put together cryptography is already virtually unbreakable, at least until the get their hands on a usable quantum computer, so at least 5 or 10 years
This really only should apply to asymmetric cryptosystems like RSA and elliptic curve crypto that depend on the difficulty of prime factorization. (edit: there are ECC and lattice based asymmetric cryptosystems which will almost certainly not be able to be cracked by quantum computers, like derivatives of McEliece encryption, they're just not widely implemented despite having been around since before encryption was widely adopted on the Web, mainly because they have really big key sizes that would have been a lot less feasible to pass around on DSL)
Property implemented symmetric encryption algorithms today will still require bruteforcing most likely, and quantum computers will be pretty limited in terms of processing time so I doubt they'll be put to that task for the most part.
As long as that's true:
Another idea was a breakthrough in cryptography makings comms be completely anonymous, giving insurgent movements a more even playing field.
@Kestrel I would be 500% be in prison right now if existing technologies were able to crack modern cryptography (edit: and defeat the anonymity models of existing garlic & onion routers). And even when prime factorization is feasible in a human lifetime, I should still be alright because symmetric encryption should still be secure at that point (and no, I'm not dumb, I didn't rely on transmitting symmetric keys via asymmetrically encrypted channels).
The Point of View Gun from the Hitchhikers Guide movie
I woke up and read this comment, and then concocted a world in which 28 Days Later rage zombies were motivated by some rich guy creating a way to impose his point of view on everyone.
accidently brought my propaganda detector into the bathroom again and cowered beneath the sink as the deafening screech echoed off the hard tile
(they have signs telling me to wash my hands)
a machine that goes beep if it detects a liberal. this website would make it burst into flames
Maybe... Advanced economic planning using AI by a massive economic power that controls global manufacturing and is led by a communist party. :xi-lib-tears:
We might have it after all.
Very relevant article on the topic: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-can-china-use-artificial-intelligence-to-perfect-central-planning/
The article is anti-China and anti-Marxist (as you'd expect), but is still very interesting.
I honestly can't think of anything. Any technological advances will simply be co-opted by capitalism. we can't invent our way out of capitalism anymore than the capitalists can invent their way out of its contradictions.
that doesn't mean socialism is hopeless, mind you. just that I don't think that technological advances offer a path to socialism. we thought they would in the 19th century--that industry and automation could give us a better life--and we turned out to be wrong.
I disagree that capitalism inevitably cohorts all technological advances. Sometimes technology is suppressed instead. Additionally, advanced technology like nuclear fusion (and to a lesser extent fission reactors) and space based solar power will likely have such a high capital cost that only socialist economies and maybe a handful of capitalist economies would be able to invest in them.
That said, I agree with your critique of techno optimism. While changes in the mode of production are partially caused by a handful of significant inventions, we cannot expect for one to suddenly thrust ourselves into socialism.
Massive inventions that change productive relations are not a path to communism, just an opportunity to sieze the means of production during the crisis that the new productive mode causes.
The reason that technology has mostly stagnated since the 60s is because huge changes in the way business and production is conducted destabilizes the status quo as it learns to cope with the new system.
Another idea was a breakthrough in cryptography makings comms be completely anonymous, giving insurgent movements a more even playing field.
Quantum cryptography is unbreakable (at least with classical methods) and tamper-proof, though obviously it'll be some time before we all have quantum computers in our houses, if ever. I assume it's gonna be one of those things where if the government lets us have it, that mean they've found a way to break it.
With the constraint of no weapons, I think a source of renewable energy that is both inexpensive in terms of money and materials and applicable everywhere would be a top priority. If it can't be constrained, as you say, then farewell to large sections of the fossil fuel industry, and therefore the petrodollar, and a fundamental pillar of American hegemony has been destroyed. So perhaps a joint revolution in battery technology and decentralized solar power would work. If you could get fusion down small enough then maybe, and it was inexpensive or made unnecessary to extract the hydrogen isotopes from water, but we don't have any power-generating fusion reactors that work for a substantial amount of time yet.
China actually has some compact reactors in the works, the size of a bedroom. You can power it from thorium and other common radioactive materials that you can get pretty easily just from having a single dig site or mine nearby of any type and kind. Still in the preliminary stages of development, though.
The more interesting thing is how China is implementing AI to build dams and other concrete constructions faster and safer. It is already looking promising, where their hybrid human-AI constructions doubled the speed of superdam building from 10 years to 4 years to build (re: this has already happened successfully. they are now working on nearly full AI dams to get a projected speed of 2 years to build dams the size of the three gorges). Theres already studies and preliminary work on using it for nuclear construction to speed up the oft-cited 10 year construction time of nuclear reactors, but that will be slightly trickier than a dam depending on what theyre going for.
China is implementing AI to build dams and other concrete constructions faster and safer.
That sound you just heard was me getting a powerful whiff of future shock. This is not the world I was born in to.
yeah the fact is it has already happened partially on one project in 4 years. heres their 2 year plan, which is bound to succeed. i read the papers and posted them here translated at one point, really impressive and solid tech.
heres the 4 year dam, the 4th largest dam in the world (or the largest arch dam in the world): https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3125651/how-china-built-worlds-largest-arch-dam-just-four-years?module=inline&pgtype=article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baihetan_Dam
china is in a uniquely good position for hydropower. all of those rivers blasting off the tibetan plateau have huge potential for dozens of high powered massive dams. it also brings an added benefit of regional stability, people used to die in the millions to floods before the communist party began constructing dams and flood resistant cities. this offsets the environmental impact inherent to dams, imo. we gotta make sure people arent dying first and foremost.
