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People in such a universe probably wouldn't take on profit-driven projects like Lord of the Rings or Halo.  Such projects wouldn't likely be done at all.  It would be hard to find 200 people to work a few years just to make a movie or a game, unless they were all extremely passionate about the end result.

But this isn't a bad thing.  It means this people would be doing something better with their time, investing it in something that was more important to them.  After all, if money is the deciding factor is whether or not your time is well spent, then what else would you be doing if money was not a factor?  Perhaps that's what you should be doing instead, and find a way to make it pay off financially.

And in fact this is one of the reasons I opted to leave the gaming industry myself -- there are better uses of my time than investing months of hard work to make a new game just to entertain people.  I figured out I could do better.

When you remove money from the equation, it becomes a bit more clear what "better" is.

posted by StevePavlinaJune 30, 2005 at 1:21

Hey I read that too [ e ]

Hey I read that too Gregg, Steves page I mean.

Also, I highly recommend this book called "7 Habits of Highly Effective People".  That's good stuff!

I think I'm going to move to Beijing in 2007.  My thats... MY plan!

posted by HarveyJune 30, 2005 at 8:27

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I don't think it's the profit that matters, it's the leadership. Most people don't like to be lead, they only put up with it because they have to.  At least that's how it seems to me.

Want to build a new skyscraper or a new car or a new piece of software? Sure, I suppose if you go to the software route you can point to open source but I think you can also point to open source as failure as well. Are there any non-funded user friendly well designed open source apps?  I bring that up because it feels like basically the only reason say Photoshop is polished and Gimp is not is because Adobe pays someone to polish it who would not otherwise polish it of their own free will.  There's nothing stopping open source software from being as polished as Mac OS except that taking to that level is tedious in the extreme and so only people that are getting paid and need the money will put up with all the adjusting and testing and scheduling and coordinating and debating that needs to happen.

That's why Blender while functional is not close to any of the major commerical 3d apps in quality. Firefox and Open Office might be but both of those are actually funded.

My point is it's all that busy work that the money motivation solves. Who cleans the toilets on the Enterprise?  Are they happy to do it?  Is it only done because they are in the military and would get court marshalled if they didn't?  Today, people clean toilets for money.  Remove the money and no one would clean any toilet except their own.

posted by greggmanJune 30, 2005 at 12:50

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A year or two ago I was thinking about what a great society TNG seems to be, but we only really view a small portion of it. We're never truly shown what's beyond the "elite" which is Starfleet Academy. It's safe to assume that the lazy, the stupid and the morally deficient don't make it into the Academy to begin with, so we're actually shown a rather skewed utopia that couldn't possibly exist even with all of their explanations for things.

The reason I was even thinking about ST:TNG was my thoughts on "replicators" and what would happen if they ever existed. Basically, the first thought is that it would be the solution to all of man's problems. (end of world hunger, end of the disparity between classes, etc). We would no longer need to buy things and that in turn negates the need for money and a capitalist society. Utopia here we come!

But think a little deeper and we can see how flawed that assumption is. Replicators would need some sort of base material to make objects from. Someone has to make the base materials. That can't be free. I suppose we could have machines that turn garbage into base materials, but then what happens if you run out? Well, I could replicate a gun and steal.

Next flaw is that we would still need people to design things. A replicator can't replicate something without some sort of blueprint to go by. So we'll still need designers, engineers, programmers, project managers, producers, testers, artists, etc...  Now what would motivate all these people to spend so much time developing these blueprints for products? Surely they wouldn't do it for free. The blueprints then also cannot be free. Well there goes the idea that we won't need money!

There will of course be many more hurdles that arise out of technologies like this. We are already beginning to see the effects of this right now, through data replication (which exists here and now!) Most of us think we would like to see a world where we have the rights and freedoms to download anything and everything we want for free (songs, games, software...) but the obvious problems with that utopian ideal are the same as I outlined above and it's a real sticky situation. Thoughts of DRM schemes, broadcast flags, etc, etc really leave a bad taste in my mouth. None of us want big corporations dictating what we consume and how, yet a money-less free society is just impossible. We have to come to a compromise in the middle. People still need to earn a living, yet we need to figure out how to do so without letting corps get too big, too restrictive and out of control.

~RB

Our technology has already started down the path where replication is eliminating the need for bought goods (a "free" MP3 file for example).

posted by RayBJuly 4, 2005 at 14:16

Computers will do everything [ e ]

In a society of such advanced technology as ST:TNG computers/robots could and would do anything that is too boring for humans to want to do.  The writers of ST:TNG have not forseen and incorporated that fact except with the token presence of the character naned "Data".   Read The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil.   Want to make Lord of the Rings?  tell your computer to make it for you and then experience it on the holodeck, not as a flat screen movie.  Be the director change it as you go, etc.  That world will be so different it's hard to imagine it without dragging along our current habits of thought and preconceptions. 

-John

posted by JohnAlvaradoJuly 14, 2005 at 13:11