I think something like that would be part of dealing with a reactionary industrial civilization, yeah. You make treats for their privileged classes in automated factories elsewhere in the system, and use the profits to pay all the local workers you'd need for the infrastructure projects, schools, hospitals, etc and to hire anyone displaced by the changing economy. I think overall mitigating the harm to sapient beings wherever possible would be the best way to go about it, since you have such a clear power disparity at work.
Like, you don't have to worry about reactionaries attacking your offworld facilities, you have to worry about them attacking their own species, you don't have to worry about material limitations and a lack of capital, you have to worry about the cost in life and wellbeing that would come from not deploying it everywhere it's needed. You're effectively the hegemonic power as soon as you enter the system to such an extent that you have to be careful and precise to avoid harming the locals more than you need to figure out how to materially overcome their ruling class. And after seeing to their species' immediate needs you then have to think about how they can be integrated into the communist interstellar in a way that preserves their agency and dignity instead of just turning them into a new species of human so to speak.
And that's with an industrial civilization that may or may not have a socialist-equivalent ideology already present, how do you approach an iron-age feudal society, or a bureaucratic classical empire? What if they're semi-nomadic horticulturalists with no metallurgy but scattered copper working at the most? The power disparity doesn't meaningfully change because of how extreme it was to begin with, but how one has to interact with them does. Hell, how do you approach creating medical technology for a species that doesn't have an established body of work already? There's no way to approach that that isn't messy and there are countless pitfalls that could lead to inadvertently harming them in the process (like say you can build up a perfect digital model of them by destructively scanning a few already dead bodies, which lets you test simulated chemicals to see what effect they'd have and what would be safe, only to find out after deploying the equivalent an antibiotic that it interacts with specific genetic conditions to become fatal or even just not work at all and your models just didn't include any subjects with that condition, etc).
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it, or do you play it as safe and thorough as possible even knowing that literally every single day that you haven't converted the planet to a socialist system with advanced technology countless sapient beings die and suffer needlessly in ways you could have prevented? That's the real dilemma to this, isn't it? Because I think just rolling in with legions of robot soldiers and taking control by force would obviously save many lives over doing literally nothing, but it would cause a violent backlash and a reactionary insurgency and the process of seizing power would end up killing a lot of locals needlessly, leaving long-lasting scars that would haunt any subsequent socialist projects. So the middle ground is probably the best, seeing eliminating material deprivation for the locals as the most essential first step while enforcing diplomatic solutions to any local geopolitical conflicts, and from there working to build a socialist system tailored to their species and culture and effectively bribing their ruling class to peacefully abdicate.
You're effectively unbounded by the material constraints that plagued actual socialist projects in this thought experiment, so I don't think the sorts of concessions that they had to make remain necessary to it. If you're not embattled, you have the luxury of peace and mercy in a way that an encircled state already suffering counter-revolutionary terror does not. If you have effectively infinite advanced industrial capital, you don't have to prioritize where it gets used and can instead ensure that every farm has a tractor, that there are freight rails everywhere they're needed, that everyone can have a comfortable and safe living space in a rapidly built housing block, etc.
Also what the fuck is wrong with me, I didn't just think this up I had all the pieces ready to go in my head already. Some of the questions in this weren't rhetorical but like actual ethical questions I've thought about posing as thought experiments here because I'm unsure of my answers to them.
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it,
absolutely, if you can't accept this you can never accomplish ANYTHING
I think something like that would be part of dealing with a reactionary industrial civilization, yeah. You make treats for their privileged classes in automated factories elsewhere in the system, and use the profits to pay all the local workers you'd need for the infrastructure projects, schools, hospitals, etc and to hire anyone displaced by the changing economy. I think overall mitigating the harm to sapient beings wherever possible would be the best way to go about it, since you have such a clear power disparity at work.
Like, you don't have to worry about reactionaries attacking your offworld facilities, you have to worry about them attacking their own species, you don't have to worry about material limitations and a lack of capital, you have to worry about the cost in life and wellbeing that would come from not deploying it everywhere it's needed. You're effectively the hegemonic power as soon as you enter the system to such an extent that you have to be careful and precise to avoid harming the locals more than you need to figure out how to materially overcome their ruling class. And after seeing to their species' immediate needs you then have to think about how they can be integrated into the communist interstellar in a way that preserves their agency and dignity instead of just turning them into a new species of human so to speak.
And that's with an industrial civilization that may or may not have a socialist-equivalent ideology already present, how do you approach an iron-age feudal society, or a bureaucratic classical empire? What if they're semi-nomadic horticulturalists with no metallurgy but scattered copper working at the most? The power disparity doesn't meaningfully change because of how extreme it was to begin with, but how one has to interact with them does. Hell, how do you approach creating medical technology for a species that doesn't have an established body of work already? There's no way to approach that that isn't messy and there are countless pitfalls that could lead to inadvertently harming them in the process (like say you can build up a perfect digital model of them by destructively scanning a few already dead bodies, which lets you test simulated chemicals to see what effect they'd have and what would be safe, only to find out after deploying the equivalent an antibiotic that it interacts with specific genetic conditions to become fatal or even just not work at all and your models just didn't include any subjects with that condition, etc).
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it, or do you play it as safe and thorough as possible even knowing that literally every single day that you haven't converted the planet to a socialist system with advanced technology countless sapient beings die and suffer needlessly in ways you could have prevented? That's the real dilemma to this, isn't it? Because I think just rolling in with legions of robot soldiers and taking control by force would obviously save many lives over doing literally nothing, but it would cause a violent backlash and a reactionary insurgency and the process of seizing power would end up killing a lot of locals needlessly, leaving long-lasting scars that would haunt any subsequent socialist projects. So the middle ground is probably the best, seeing eliminating material deprivation for the locals as the most essential first step while enforcing diplomatic solutions to any local geopolitical conflicts, and from there working to build a socialist system tailored to their species and culture and effectively bribing their ruling class to peacefully abdicate.
You're effectively unbounded by the material constraints that plagued actual socialist projects in this thought experiment, so I don't think the sorts of concessions that they had to make remain necessary to it. If you're not embattled, you have the luxury of peace and mercy in a way that an encircled state already suffering counter-revolutionary terror does not. If you have effectively infinite advanced industrial capital, you don't have to prioritize where it gets used and can instead ensure that every farm has a tractor, that there are freight rails everywhere they're needed, that everyone can have a comfortable and safe living space in a rapidly built housing block, etc.
Also what the fuck is wrong with me, I didn't just think this up I had all the pieces ready to go in my head already. Some of the questions in this weren't rhetorical but like actual ethical questions I've thought about posing as thought experiments here because I'm unsure of my answers to them.
absolutely, if you can't accept this you can never accomplish ANYTHING