I’ve been watching Isaac Arthur episodes. In one he proposes that O’Neil cylinders would be potential havens for micro cultures. I tend to think of colony structures more like something created by a central authority.
He also brought up the question of motivations to colonize other star systems. This is where my centralist perspective pushes me into the idea of an AGI run government where redundancy is a critical aspect in everything. Like how do you get around the AI alignment problem, – redundancy of many systems running in parallel. How do you ensure the survival of sentient life, – the same type of redundancy.
The idea of colonies as havens for microcultures punches a big hole in my futurist fantasies. I hope there are a few people out here in Lemmy space that like to think about and discuss their ideas on this, or would like to start now.
Most everyone will still “work”, but the nature of work will likely be radically altered in any truly post-scarcity society.
Essentially, since “income” and “wealth” will not exist in a post-scarcity society, people will gravitate to those things that need doing, but which cannot be easily automated. So there will still be people doing “menial jobs”, but only because they get gratification out of completing that job.
Of course, having a post-scarcity society also requires people to reach adulthood without any mental illnesses such as greed and avarice and sociopathies, which then allows us to revamp society into a more collaborative and socialistic structure where people are actively shamed by only taking and not giving back, which is how most any capitalist operates.
Essentially, post-scarcity societies can only exist in the complete absence of capitalism, because capitalism requires scarcity in order to function, and will always artificially generate scarcity where none exists. This is why so much food is wasted and destroyed in our current system - over 80% of food wastage is not done by consumers, but by distributors and sellers, in order to prop up prices and profit margins.
TL;DR, we need to utterly eviscerate and eliminate wetiko from our civilization if we are to ever achieve equality, equity, and post-scarcity. Greed and avarice of any kind must become the worst possible insults to apply to others in this world.
As someone that has been disabled for very nearly 10 years and had to deal with the issue of what work really means to a person’s mental wellbeing. It provides a surprising function of purpose in one’s life. When one is both young and experiences this loss of structured purpose it can be daunting to suddenly need to restructure. I think my challenges were also being in relative isolation and an outlier from the norm. I went through what most experienced with covid but orders of magnitude larger and for far longer. Like how people learned to adjust to quarantine and isolation, I think they will adjust to post-scarcity. I think many will choose to do jobs, like maybe a barista that enjoys the social aspect. I think the vast majority would usher in a guilded age of arts and culture where most humans work to add flourishes to enrich our collective lives. Something like how open source software is a large contributing community that is far greater in scope and achievement than anything proprietary. This is how I had to adjust, turning to hobbies and taking ever deeper dives on my own.