>
> Maldistribution is an enormous problem, yes. But I'm not sure that
> material abundance is already sufficient...
>
> There is enough to feed everybody, yes (and with current population
> projections suggesting that the world population will stabilize at 12
> billion in 2050 the Paul Ehrlich vision of mass die-offs in South
> Asia will not come true). But at the moment there isn't enough to
> give everyone once-a-year vacations at Kapalua Beach in Hawaii a
> broadband connection to the internet, or a large-screen TV-VCR on
> which to watch their own copies of "Don Giovanni," "Casablanca," "The
> Seven Samurai," and "The Rules of the Game" when it strikes them.
************
Well, who's running traveling-farm production-to-market logistics programs [like the travelling salesman algorithms] on the CM-5's or are they still spending more time programming war games in the machines? If so, what's the algorithm for changing the programmers minds- metaprogramming?
>
> And then there is the problem of creating people who will realize
> that they really want to watch "The Rules of the Game" instead of
> "Survivor IX: Eating Rats and Backstabbing Your Fellows in the
> Amazon," and realize that they want to be connected citizens and
> species-beings rather than anomic liberal individuals.
********
Calling Aldous Huxley and Alexander Shulgin :-).
>
> I don't know which problem--the problem of redistribution, the
> problem of abundance, or the problem of taste--is a bigger block to
> utopian aspirations in the long run. I do know that we can make
> progress toward solving the problem of abundance, but that we don't
> have a chance in hell of *ever* moving toward the redistributions
> across national borders to solve the problem of maldistribution.
>
>
> Brad DeLong
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Without hope you cannot start the day [Jon Anderson]
Ian
>