Imagine what the world would be like if didn't need to worry about bad actors. This is a considerable amount of engineering energy to make this safe.
I know safety isn't all about about malicious attacks, but I like to imagine living in a world without the need for locks, passwords, keys, safes, signatures, contracts, lawyers, ... we would probably all be fed and populating the solar system by now.
I have a hard time imagining such a world precisely because being a bad actor is a part of our DNA and the DNA of many many animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi we interact with. The unintended consequence of lack of selfishness could be mind boggling. Think about it this way: Silicone Valley mostly provides the last 5% of the tech needed to make any given product. You know where the rest comes from? Military tech that eventually makes its way to civilian use. Things like semiconductors, the Internet, GPS, rocket propulsion, etc. No conflict == no military == no tech == we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I am definitely not saying we couldn’t all be a whole lot nicer to each other. But I am saying that we wouldn’t be human if that was wired into us.
The military's role in this seems very much rooted in selfishness and adversity, to the extent that a more cooperative species (let's be honest it's not gonna be us) would find plenty of non-military motivation to do similar amounts of basic and applied research.
Maybe in German. I personally regularly curse the fact that I was born a human when I am confronted with uniquely human problems: having to cook, sweating my behind off, having to waste time using the bathroom, experiencing strong emotions like anger or jealousy or envy. These are the things that make us human, but they often times I find them highly annoying and wish my ancestors had evolved out of some of them.
Your estimation of the military is way off, I suspect.
Hey, these days the military is using consumer grad iPads, because they are cheaper and good enough.
There are more things in heaven and earth than just the military and SV.
One big example that's often brought up of military tech leading the way is programmable computers. And, yes, in our history that's what happened. But International Business Machines was hot on their heels purely for commercial computing. (If the militaries of the world hadn't blown up so many resources, business would have likely come up with programmable computers a few years earlier, thus completely eliminating the gap.)
I am not saying that any and all tech comes from the military. I am saying that the military is and always has been the driver for innovation more so than any other industry. IBM derives a large share of its profits from tech originally funded by the military for military purposes. The roads we drive on, the cars we drive, the semiconductors we use, the tampons and pads we use, are all pretty direct examples. Lots are indirect. The military also uses duct tape and drives Jeeps. Both were originally invented and built for the military in 1940s. DARPA is still a huge contributor to what we will be taking for granted 20 years from now. There are other researchers of course, I'm not disputing that. This year's National Science Foundation in the US has a budget of $7.1 billion, while military research combined totals $59 billion.
Ancient Rome was very military driven. They also had classes of people, which I'd argue is about as selfish as you can get. They could absolutely land on the moon with enough time.
In that world, since you don’t have bad actors, you would likely be ruled by a benevolent king or queen.
A large part of why have democracy and separation of powers is to protect from bad actors.
But yeah, not having to deal with bad actors can enable massive achievements. The pyramids were built when Egypt was more or less safe from any external invasion and ruled by god-kings who could coordinate massive building projects.
The problem with an enlightened and benevolent ruler is that even if he really is that good (and history uncovers a lot of dirt even for rulers popularly known as enlightened and benevolent) what do you do when they die or decide to quit ? Their children could be insane psychopats unfit to rule (as indeed often demonstrated in history) or there would be a civil war with various factions trying to fill the power vacuum.
With all its faults democracy has these edge cases handled and makes the elected group of rukers much more acountable with mens to get ridd of they if they turn out to be too unfit to rule.
Yeah, it has always been in the thoughts of mankind to have a benovolent, righteous king to even the point where the natural world and the animal kingdom would be in harmony. If the events of Isaiah 11 ever come to fruition, I imagine we'll cure cancer, have quantum computers, and unlock the mysteries of the universe.
You can still gain efficiency by centralising services. If you have centralised services you need some mechanism to coordinate them and make decisions about how they should work, and those decisions should ideally take input from the people using the services. Even in a no-bad-actors world you still have many different competing interests to balance due to different people's needs and preferences, so you probably want some kind of polling/citizens forum/whatever to gather input for making decisions, and an organisation that looks at all the details and makes the decisions on behalf of the collective.
Or by example: You still want someone to organise weekly garbage collection efficiently and equitably. The government does that.
Regular private companies work pretty well for coordinating and providing paid for services. Especially something like garbage collection.
Of course, details depend for example on what our 'no bad actor' assumption actually means, and perhaps on what ideas you have about human nature and history.
> Even in a no-bad-actors world you still have many different competing interests to balance due to different people's needs and preferences, so you probably want some kind of polling/citizens forum/whatever to gather input for making decisions, and an organisation that looks at all the details and makes the decisions on behalf of the collective.
Yes, you'll want some kind of organisation. My comment was just that the organisation would probably not look like a monarchy, benevolent or otherwise.
You could also go by something like 'You are not a bad actor, if (outside of emergencies) you don't lie, cheat, murder or steal.' Or you can go with something closer to game theory, and emphasis cooperation in something like a prisoner dilemma.
So you're saying our genes are going to compete and evolve so that we no longer compete and evolve? That's not how it works.
But a less flippant way to put it is that a world without "bad" actors isn't a stable equilibrium. It cannot and will not ever happen. If you need convincing, look to nature. An equilibrium is only formed through a multitude of mixed strategies.
Artificial selection might result in what you desire, but that would be.. unpopular, to say the least.
I know safety isn't all about about malicious attacks, but I like to imagine living in a world without the need for locks, passwords, keys, safes, signatures, contracts, lawyers, ... we would probably all be fed and populating the solar system by now.