On the other hand, you've not addressed the fundamental moral wrong of forcing humans to live in poverty because "environmentalism" when there are artificial habitats they could live in, and seemingly limitless potential to make more.
Well, there's the age-old idea that you don't give people the answer, but give them the background to be able to work it out for themselves in due course. Maybe Alice is bringing this society on slowly in the hope that her guidance will produce a better advanced society in the distant future than the one which the blink cut off.
I'm not criticising AG. I'm criticizing the theory that some force is specifically restricting access to technology on the surface, and that for is not the people who live there. That, whatever else, their way of life is externally imposed upon them.
With that in mind, this is not give a man a fish. It's pretty much the opposite of that saw. It's specifically NOT teaching a man to fish, or even allowing him to understand the principles of fishing. Nanotechnology would be outside the experience of anyone living more than few tens of miles from an Alice. When the superforce proposed above stopped some industrial process from working the people wouldn't have any idea why. If the superforce came down and told them "no, they would label it God, which really isn't much better than not understand why the proper application of heat and pressure lines up with the mathematical model when making steel but seems to fail for no known reason when applied to latex. Why you can distill liquor but can't distill hydrocarbon fuels.
There is nothing morally valuable about work for its own sake. That's primarily a myth enforced top down. Long ago, it did lead to a better life for all involved, but that's been steadily eroding in terms of distribution of wealth for some time. It seems to go cyclically, where work starts as collective cooperation for the common good (at least in large part) but erodes to a pure rat race that only enlivens and enriches the most ruthless few.
So, yes. IMO any system relies on fundamentally unnecessary manual labor to survive is poverty if there exists a system that could effectively remove that burden and allow people to pursue their highest potential.
Would people actually do that? Hell if I know. I would recommend reading Neil Stephenson's
The Diamond Age for a sense of what nanotechnology not half as advanced as what Gavia has could actually do.
Earth is flush with water. Or big issue is that most of it is too salty (and most hat isn't is ice, and worse the heat, while melting the ice part, it's mixing it with the salty part.
A nano bot filter would fairly efforlessly remove the salt from the water. It would extract carbon from the air more effectively and efficiently than trees do. In fact, one of the nanopunk writers accurately noted that nanobot based carbon capture would be so efficient, we'd start running out of easily accessible carbon sources. One proposal was to just set the Appalachian chain coal deposits on fire, to keep atmospheric CO2 dropping too low.
A properly configured universale assembler system could build almost anything, as insanely low cost. It could remediate any environmental impact at insanely low cost.
The assembler system in the Diamond Age is very much like Eric Dexler's concept, which is built the way it is because such tech would be extremely sensitive to the environment. Indeed the central conflict of the story involved finding a way to build a less centralized type of assembler. While the goal in the book is system that would still be a macro-scale device, Gavia's nanotech is, apparently, free and nearly full self-replicating, able to operate in the least controlled of environments (A human body) and the eternal world (Gavia's nano is either UV resistant, or her internal stores rebuild fast enough that she needn't worry about sun-induced losses. She projects fire, energy blades and defensive screens. She's weaponized at least to the level of a light battle tank, and that's just a teenager. Her nano reassembled the teeth Alice removed, implying that is is a UA system). The kind of resource wars Alice is afraid of would be largely solved by nanotech. The issue would be (as the nanopunk writers note) a crunch on carbon, and any other elements that make good base substrates for building nanotech. (Which is mostly carbon, as far as we know, but we're just getting started).
I'm not saying that people who are fulfilled by manual labor are immoral. I'm saying that it is immoral to force a way of life on people who never asked to be born, much less born in the 19th century 2.0, to live that way when there are other options. I'm allowing for the whole Environmental Preserve Earth concept. But if that which blinked is still actively intervening, it like has the ability to identify those who would be happiest in both environments and move them to where they would be most needed. Both from a practical view of what nanotech could do, and from a view of the effort needed to enforce a low tech system (i.e. not only prevent know advances beyond a certain techlevel, but prevent the chemists from advancing in other ways) suggests the blinkers would have the power to intervene in more efficient, more humane ways. Thus, it seems more likely that the blinkers intervened and skipped town. Otherwise, they'd be malevolent force.
I would have some doubts about Alices fitness to guide humantiy to a better future based on her reactions to Gavia's threat and then Ardent's. In both cases she fails the WWJD test.
What Would Jean-luc Do? If you can't make a call that would make Captain Picard proud, you don't deserve to wear that ... Erm, you probably aren't fit to lead humanity to less mostrous future. Rule one of such a job. You can't be a monster. Again, however, she might be bluffing.
Somethings to consider. It's much more likely, interms of what's actually going on, that the trees are malevolent force. Even on a conservative time frame we're no more than 100 years from singularity in the real world. In AG, they are thousands past singularity and there hasn't been another they we are aware of. Likely this is because of the spacetrees. They are bioconstructed intelligences, and lack the easy of machine AI's ability to self improve. They could likely design a smarter tree, but they can't easily BECOME a smarter tree. (Personally, I think this limit would be overcome given 1000s of years, but since Alice seems to personally know these trees it seems likely that they are not able to self upgrade.) The space trees are almost certainly the BIOTECH side of the warring factions. What Blinked was likely the techtech side. An AI runaway. Intelligence explosion. Exponetially increasing cognition.
While the space people could be the tech side, and the blinker could be intervening to prevent them building a second exponetial intellect, ALice personally knowing the trees suggests to me that they predate the blink, just like she does.
Another important point about engineering such a system, I've mentioned this before, it would be both more effective and more humane to engineer the
people such that they never want to build jet planes and such. I see no difference in doing that and engineering the environment to be hostile to attempts to build jet planes. But the form would be more human because everyone would happy with their lot in life. No one would be frustrated by a world that refuses to conform to the math, and most of all, anyone who got a look at the super pump would say, "Flashy, but it seems really too extravagant. Maybe we'd better build in some saftely locks to limit it's output."
In short, the easiest path wasn't taken, or Alice would have nothing to fear, and the spacetrees would be impotent.
Again, all I'm saying is that an interventionist blinker represents a pretty big plot hole. A non interventionist blinker doesn't. Something blinked and left town. When it's fair that the decendents many generations removed are stuck in a low tech world isn't relevant because there's no one around to change their lot in life. Those who want something might be being stifled by lack of resources, or just the tyranny of majorites or Alice's. There are issues with that, but they are of fundamentally different nature than an active power that could interven for the betterment of all and choose not to is the most convoluted manner possible.
Which is, incidentally, a good description of why I'm an atheist.
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Topic: Unanswered Questions from the Alice-verse (Read 47983 times)