The point of an idea is to spread and hopefully to merge with other ideas.
Take, for example, the idea of me worrying about how we’ll manage to not slash each others’ throats in a few decades when 3D printing is sufficiently advanced to be cheap and good enough to have a serious impact on dozens of major industries when we can’t even figure out that out of the commercial media industry and society, society’s the one that shouldn’t have to step back. It could meet the idea that all matter — the matter used in those 3D printers to displace the matter otherwise used in a distant country at scale to assemble the same machine, the matter in a polycarbonate and aluminium disc that used to mean so much and now means so little, the matter in any of a number of fiber cables going across the Atlantic, the Pacific or the Indian oceans that’s making all this happen, or the matter inside a flower’s petal — was once forged in stars and has travelled many light years for billions of years to get to where it is right now.
Or why not take the idea of God’s Debris, which I swore I mentioned before but seemingly haven’t, and which you should absolutely read now because I think I may be about to spoil it, really, do read it in the short interim before you even finish this sentence, it’s quite a lovely book, available for free as a PDF online and it’s written by Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, which I hated before I read this book and then I started thinking that this guy really knew something and now I actually think he’s kind of smart and kind of like Dilbert as well which just goes to show that you’d better have plasticity in your opinions or you’ll really miss out on some things, like how the point of God’s Debris, or rather the central premise, which I hope you have read by now, that is not just God’s Debris but also its central premise which shows up rather late, and this is quite enough stalling and if you haven’t left by now to download and read it you’re deserving to read what you’re going to read, which again is the central premise, being how the sole point of a God, the only thing it could ever do to amuse itself, assuming that it’d know and be able to do anything, paradoxes be damned, would be to blow itself up, to end its own life as it were, and the real shocker in the entire novel is the assumption by the old man that mankind’s ascent from language and crude tools are to gain the level of knowledge and advanced facilities of a God in that we will be able to master the physics, not to mold them to our liking, but to take advantage of everything within their limits, which the old man would see as God rebuilding itself, but which is in any case rather interesting and if not directly applicable then at least worth the comparison since given the past few thousand years we seem to be getting a handle on at least the technology stuff, even if some people would have you believe that the Universe didn’t take thirteen-something billion years to get a handle on everything else first and would just rather God have been around for just those thousands of years, but enough of that since we don’t need those people and those particular concepts to make this premise interesting, and this sentence has turned out to be rather long already.
So if this place — waffle, that is — is really going to go foom within about a month, I think I’m at least going to drop some interesting Claim Chowder on my way out. If manipulating most aspects of materia and life is really within humanity’s grasp at all, it’ll happen within the next thousand years or it won’t happen at all. I know that this is a cop-out in terms of scale since it’s hard to verify, but I also suspect it boxes in how I feel about human progress and the Universe, which isn’t a bad conciliatory prize.
But my second prediction is simply that technological progress will be tremendous and the driver of the most change — good and bad — in the world on micro and macro scale in the immediate future. Like I said, if people lose their shit because CDs can now be downloaded and it takes ten years of uneasy upheaval to sail that industry to a point where both it and its customers are pleased with the arrangement and the rest of the media types and art forms have largely yet to make this work, imagine what will happen to the industries of production, distribution; the silent cornerstones of trade without which much of anything else would lay unproduced or unarrived?
Ideas are ideas. Patents and “Intellectual Property” started out as ways to encapsulate them for the good of competition, but regardless of your opinion on whether they continue doing so — and if it wasn’t absolutely clear by now, I am convinced that they are now poisonous due to the ease of access that the surrounding post describes — they’re not going to get less controversial in the next thirty years. If we are going to collectively lose our shit over this, please let it be now. Please let us work out that on the whole, ideas are what matters, the betterment of society and life is what’s important, and it’s for the good of humanity if we use any such innovations to make our life better, rather than block them because they upset what we have now. Death and destruction, such that they may appear, will not follow in the wake of using the sum of knowledge humankind has accumulated, but by the hands of those that are comfortable now and will be trying to prevent it.
I hope you get the idea.