I'm a Utopian idealist - prove me wrong!

= MEDICINE = You claim that human-level medical AI is "centuries" in the future. This is absolutely flat wrong; it is 35 years in the past. An AI called MYCIN (http://en.wikipedia.org...) in the 1970s outperformed expert human diagnosticians. Today's AI are well over a billion times more powerful; think what they could do! Medical diagnosis requires calculating the outcome of a huge amount of interdependent data: symptoms, family history, lifestyle, proteomic and genomic data, test results, results of scans etc. AI already does this sort of analysis much better than humans. Medical AI has been proved in practise, so I needn't argue it too much. Beyond diagnosis, things like dispensing drugs are easily done by automated systems and digital reminders. Autonomous surgical robots are also under development. Adciv.org/Medicine presents in more detail what is becoming possible in medicine. = ENERGY = Your vision of the Chinese and Indian governments rolling out alternative energy in grand top-down projects completely misses the point; advancing fabrication technologies, along with open-source know-how, are giving people the ability to take care of their own needs of technology (including power-generation). We no longer have to rely on the bureaucratic arrangements of government projects or free-market enterprises to create abundance. Nor do people have to rely on the monetary system, which circumvents the "not enough money" snafu that you keep bringing up. Your arguments about nuclear power have some validity, but nuclear power is not essential to what I am proposing - I brought it up merely as one of many available energy sources. (Besides, most of what I said was about fusion, which doesn't have the same waste problems as fission.) = MAINTENANCE = You claim "I doubt we would trust automatic systems to watch over a potentially radiation catastrophe". I find it hard to see your logic here; don't we already rely on automatic systems to monitor surges in our power-plants, to diagnose problems in our aeroplanes, to calculate radiation doses for our chemotherapy, to drive certain train networks, and to do any one of hundreds of tasks with human lives at stake? People rightly trust AI more than human monitoring for such vital tasks, because we know how error-prone humans are. Again, your speculations have ignored the facts of the world. = WATER = Creating nanotubes is easy; you heat carbon with a laser in a helium chamber. The technology is far from being "incredibly complex", as you claim, and is frequently done on small scales in university labs and the like. The raw materials are graphite, helium and a cobalt-nickel catalyst - all cheap, abundant and ubiquitous. That is why carbon nanotubes are so cheap now, about two or three dollars per gram. The Tata Swach is a nanofiltration device for water that costs just $21. Doesn't that prove that nanofiltration is cheap and feasible? = ABUNDANCE OF FOOD RESOURCES = Your claim that growing more food means a land-grab is totally wrong. Increasing food-production means using better strains of plants, better pest management and all-round smarter farming to increase the amount of food grown per unit of land. The UN predicts that 90% of our food-production increase will come from increased yield, with only 10% coming from expanding farmland (http://www.fao.org...). We currently have 31.8 trillion square meters of farmland. If we grow high-yield crops in dense intercropped systems and intelligently apply scientific knowledge, we can grow food for a person on 400 square meters. (This is taking a pessimistic estimate. For a list of sources on the farmland needed per person, see adciv.org/Talk:Food. There will obviously be regional variations; in some places just 20 square meters have fed people.) 31.8 trillion divided by 400 is 79.5 billion. That is the number of people that could be fed without expanding farms one inch. If we expanded into the deserts and remediate bad soil, we could increase food-production by another 25%. If we learn to grow meat in-vitro, we could feed billions more. Densely-packed aeroponic greenhouses could feed hundreds of billions more than that. Growth-promoting bacteria can increase yields 10-25%. These are just a few examples of what is possible. We have the resources to feed hundreds of billions (maybe a trillion), yet our population is not expected to grow beyond 9-15 billion. Just as with energy, there is a marvellous superabundance of agricultural resources. More importantly, there is an enormous amount of knowledge about how to utilise these resources. This know-how is being spread around the world for free through the open digital culture. "Now, the main problem with arable land is that most of it is underneath civilization and residences." Where on earth did you get this from? Only a few percent of the world's land is under human developments. Please check your facts before making claims like this. = POPULATION = "nothing indicates that the population growth will stop someday." I don't know where you keep getting these claims. There are many such indications and they are widely documented. Population is in decline in many countries in Europe. As countries in Africa, Asia and South America are developing, their birth rate is decreasing. Everything indicates that population will peak around 2050, at 9-15 billion, in line with UN projections (http://www.un.org...). But, as I have shown, the Earth can carry hundreds of billions. = ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES = You twice claimed that the changes needed are too big and would require massive top-down, heavily funded projects. That is not what I am talking about at all. I am talking about technology enabling people to create abundance locally, without reliance on governments, big business or the monetary economy. Digital fabrication technologies are improving and will continue to improve. We currently have Fab Labs that can make any electronic or mechanical device, and cost less than $50,000 (http://www.ted.com...). In the next two or three years, we will have self-replicating Fab Labs for under $20,000. (This is called RepLab; it is a project I am helping manage.) Fabrication is getting to the point of the molecular assembler (http://en.wikipedia.org...) which can make anything from anything by rearranging the atoms. Extrapolating miniturization (http://www.singularity.com...) predicts we will have molecular assemblers around 2025, while the nanotech industry roadmap says 2022-2037 (http://www.productivenanosystems.com...). Understanding the societal impact of these fabrication technologies is key to understanding the AdCiv thesis, so I'm gonna stress it a bit more. When such fabrication technologies become widespread, technology becomes decoupled from monetary needs, government intervention and market forces. Do you see that? Without digital fabrication, people must rely on government and business to provide their needs. With digital fabrication, this reliance falls away, and with it go the bureaucratic, financial and economic obstacles to abundance. People will no longer need money to provide their needs; they will need only raw materials plus information. Raw materials are ubiquitous and cheap; information is freely available through open digital culture. In exactly the same way that music has become free and abundant by cutting out the monetary aspect, so it will be for all the things needed for a wealthy life. I see no roadblocks to this happening. I started this debate in the hope that someone would point out a roadblock that I had overlooked, but you have not done so.