What's a sci-fi thing you feel is achievable with our current level of technology that you'd love to see become a thing?

At best it would prop up capitalism until we can replace it with something better.

It's literally just giving people more money to shove into the capitalist system. You don't change a system by feeding it.

I won't say it's a bad thing... but it's not a solution. It's a stop gap.

Exactly, what are those useless sociopaths supposed to be doing now? Actual labor? Come on....!

Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You're giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.

There's a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they'll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn't have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That's why money started to exist in the first place.

Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone's resource needs are different. You can't just say everyone gets the exact same everything.

Finally, we're not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn't require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.

Socialism technically, but I get your sarcasm. I hope it is sarcasm.

Well they did say Sci-Fi and we all know how likely that stuff is. So I think we're "safe" with Late Stage Capitalism.

The technology has never been what is holding us back.

we're commies on the moon, we carry a....

you got me there. there's plenty of us who would love to see everyone get a fair share.

which are all capitalist, thank you for agreeing with me.

We already know what a president with a robot body is like.

IDK why they would need to be that big. I don't even think physics would allow them to be that big. The scale of these things in fiction is pretty absurd. Especially the big walker boss in AC6. Your AC is already like 4 stories tall, and that thing makes you look like an ant.

With adequate funding. That's the part that always gets omitted. We haven't been funding the research to make it happen.

We could definitely move into industry in space, but a lot of technology still needs to be developed. I think we now have the capacity to launch factories in pieces into space, but asteroid mining remains a technical challenge due as we now know that many asteroids are not so compacted. Furthermore, refining the raw materials in space can't really be done right now, we probably could figure it out, but parts of the production chain do depend on gravity so we'd need to figure out artificial gravity on a rotating station or do some more direct kind of centrifugal refining. All hurdles we could probably cross. Then comes the question of what you drop back down from space and how you do it. Current heat shield technologies are generally poorly reusable, and even if we were we'd have to be flying the reentry devices back into space. Unless we create a cheap means to protect something from reentry that can be manufactured in space as a disposable, most goods would never be returned to earth. Unless we just refine giant cubes of rare metals and drop them into the ocean to be collected. I think most things made in space would be limited to serving those in space, or in lower gravity locations such as the moon or other asteroid bases. I would love to work on these challenges but there's very few companies working on these challenges outside of a couple of asteroid capture startups that seem to have no further vision.

We have the technology to do this. What we lack is the economic willingness to actually do it. We are literally letting people starve to death because they don't have the money to buy food. The USA literally pays farmers not to grow food to keep prices artificially high.

We throw out massive amounts of food every year, often because it sits too long and rots.

We have the technology to fix this. Corporations just don't.

First explain to me what technological limits are creating the food scarcity we're experiencing.

Sounds to me like you don't understand the question.

We easily produce enough food to feed everyone with our current technology level. Making it free and available to everyone is mostly a logistics and economic problem.

That sounds like socialism!

And it’s a very bad idea to experiment geoengineering with Earth. You don’t develop in production.

It's a valid concern, but considering that quite a few rockets, to include some currently in use, can contain quite large amounts of some truly nasty chemicals already, and apparently can be made acceptably safe despite this, I'd bet that it's probably possible to manage that risk or find flight paths that minimize exposure in the case of an accident. For that matter, we've launched radioactive materials into space before, some space probes use decay heat for a power source.

The limit is skill and discipline.

Most people can’t even drive a car that is held on the ground by gravity. You want them to…fly?

Helicopters aren't exactly convenient personal transport. We could definitely make smaller maybe autopiloted transports.

Regarding post scarcity, that was the point, we could do it now with enough motivation.

Yeah I wouldn't want them with people driving then, I'd definitely want some sort of automation to be in charge especially if there were similar amounts to road traffic.

Corporations are predictable - they try to make money. If their profit motive aligns with my own interests, then what they do will be good for me. Amazon, for example, sells me all sorts of things for low prices and with great customer support. My interests and corporate interests won't necessarily align and that's why exit rights are so important, but at least I will still be dealing with an entity acting more-or-less rationally.