Am I living in the future?

General Chat
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Arthur Clarke made some very good predictions there. Though instead of the abolision of cities, we have “cyber-nomads” now, which, admittedly, seems like an interesting way of life.
Already living in a village myself I never found any merits in moving into a large metropolis, apart from medical amenities, so if you can actually be employed in a village then the quality of life there is much higher than a city.

A friend of mine even wants to take this further and take advantage of the relative strength of currencies. His “ultimate” plan is to be able to be employed from distance and be paid US/UK salaries, while actually moving and living in a country/city where the cost of life is quite lower. Which is a very viable idea …

Let us say that you work in the US and get 50.000 dollars per year (42.750 euros).
You’d be borderline starving while living in a 600$/month basement with that kind of money in New York.
Meanwhile if you move to Greece with that kind of money you can rent a 110 sq. meters house with a garden with the same money ( here is an example https://www.spitogatos.gr/aggelia/2111474189 ) and still have 36.750 euros to spend in a country where the minimum annual salary income is around 8200 euros.

So, just by moving you improved your housing condition, living condition and it is as if you got a raise of four times the money you were once making :wink:

Anyway, I digress. Back to the science and fiction. In a way we live in the future both in the sense of accomplishment in some technological regards, but also in the sense of the lack of sociological advancement that cannot cope in speed and flexibility, in comparison to technology.

So, Asimov’s and Sagan’s famous quotes below ring especially true, now that technology has opened the floodgates:

Now all we need is to imagine in which way the disaster will manifest.
Will it be just a slow decay that noone notices until it is too late, just like in Asimov’s Foundation (but lacking any Harry Seldons in our era, without any Foundation per se :stuck_out_tongue: )
Will it be an elucidated ascendence in computers and AI taking care of everything and eventually creating a sweet tyranny from which we will petulantly complain about while hoping that it lasts forever, lust like in Asimov’s “The Life and Times of Multivac”
Will it be something else predicted? Something unpredictable?

Personally I am torn in between wanted to live long enough to find out and just not wanting to see what we will come up to mess up everything.

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43

Don’t forget extra costs to invite Gia to dinners.

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You could have decadent dinners drinking champagne and eating lobster every day while people fanned you like the queen of Egypt in a 1970ies hollywood movie about the Roman Empire and still not be able to “eat” 36.750 euros. :rofl:

Incidentally the Greek expression of throwing/waste away money is “eating their money” which should go to the language learner’s library, because, by God, I’ve seen a lot of people waste their money in gambling, cars and foolish investments/ventures, but I never actually saw anyone literally go broke by spending their money on eating. All in all, quite the weird idea for a phrase.

But, seriously, I think that this kind of thing would really be a good idea to attract new people in a lot of countries or states. Why wouldn’t someone move out of a cramped cupboard in NY or LA and go to live in an actual house with a garden in Wyoming or some place like that?

Apart from people that have obligations (taking care of kids or parents or work) that require them to be somewhere in particular, I honestly find it baffling why Arthur Clarke’s prediction didn’t come true on a more massive scale. Companies just shied away from hiring people to do remote work, even though there is a plethora of jobs in our “service providing economy” that simply do not REALLY require a physical presence in an office environment, but it took a long-lasting pandemic for companies and workers to finally realise that.

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I get your point but i know a bunch of people who will never think that a life can be better in a cheaper place and who will give everything to stay in what is supposed to be the place (to be).

Shenzhen, Beijing or Shanghai here.

In a way there is a way in life where whatever arguments you offer, people have first to satisfy some dreams before being more reasonable and logical: fast car, high tech of all kinds, penthouse. … Need to relativize these printed images before freeing themselves.

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Crowded places, lots of people, also mean less people up your business.

It’s money and fast cars, sure, but it’s also anonymity and the opportunity to breathe without the whole community down your neck.

Some people value this more than others.

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Anonymity has a double side. I completely understand this desire to get away from neighbors, people you don’t like and so on but at same time i’m not sure we are going to a better world by being able to escape them like that and living with only people you chose to.

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You’ve summarised the essence of gentrification :stuck_out_tongue:

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In some places there are laws and policies to prevent Gentrification (like in France ) They mostly rely on the association of workers and Help from state to keep their part of the town. I just mean it’s not always a fatality.

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I understand those dreams in people that have the means for them. If you are in the loop and you think that with a few years of hard work and some luck you might “get there”, it makes sense to persevere and keep fighting in those cases.

But I honestly do not see why someone goes to be a teacher or a policeman in a big city, for example. You ain’t getting paid more than your collegue in the rural setting, so it is baffling why someone like that would deliberately say “yes, PLEASE send me to the place that I can barely make ends meet”. I know people in jobs like that who actually used political ends to get transfered in big cities.

Well, to return to the topic of “the future”, I have noticed considerable differences here in rural areas, in comparison to the past. When the “old guard” grows old and die, you might be surprised to find a very dispassionate crowd left behind that really resembles more the apathetical neighbourhood situations that you might find in a far larger city.

I would agree with you that this is mostly a good thing - oh, the nosyness of some people :stuck_out_tongue: - but it can have some downsides. It is a bit sad to see people that live 500 meters away from each other and be “facebook friends” and not really interact and recognise each other on the street. That might be expectable in a large city, but in a village? Seems kinda weird.

Good point, but it is not like you choose your neighbours anywhere. It is just that in a large urban setting everything is transient and noone really cares about who lives next door. Why would they? They are there for a little time. Why bother interacting with them?

I was lucky in the few times I lived in a city and had “ok neighbours” (meaning that we did not bother each other), but I have heard a lot of complaints from other people, so it is really a matter of luck in most cases and you don’t really get to choose.

I actually had to look this up :slight_smile:
Good point, but I think it is an issue if, and only if, it is done on a large scale.
Easy example? Myconos and Santorini where the influx of a lot and, mostly rich tourists, has slowly made the place inaccessible for most natives. But I am was not talking about that. For example my friend wants to either go live in Cluj (Romania) or Buenos Aires (Argentina) (don’t ask why :stuck_out_tongue: ) and it is a random person just moving in those places. He ain’t changing the economic landscape there and that’s for sure.

If someone making good money - let’s say 10.000 per month - from investments and what-not and moved to my place and said “oh, I see that there is some prime land that got recently burned here. I am buying” and buys off 20 acres on the cheap and makes a farm and a mansion, that still does nothing to the local economy. So, I am not talking about neibourhoods and small towns turning into an “endless suburb” as Clarke put it. At least not yet.

Some countries are densely populated and it seems that whenever you go there is always something, but other countries, like mine, are not. You could literally buy some amazing real estate in the countryside on the cheap and really have noone around you living there, let alone bother you. Somehow that combines the big town annonymity with the benefits of the small villages.

Incidentally that idea looks a lot like Asimov’s “estates” in the Robot series (“The Naked Sun” and “Robots of Dawn”) whereas currently we are more or less in the “Caves of Steel” part of the future, as imagined by Asimov. :slight_smile:

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And working from home permanently seems to open these possible. But maybe the future is several jobs at once if you can do them all from home…

There is a bit of a question at the moment about how far you can be from your work location in the work at home period and what might happen “in the future”

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Let’s hope not. I can see the “bare minimum industry standard” becoming those no-lifers working 24/7 … don’t those people realise what they are doing? Look at this madness:

Some members have a Robin Hood-style outlook, believing that living wages are not distributed equally enough and working two jobs is a way to “give the man, aka Corporate America, the middle finger for always trying to screw the little people over,” says Issac.

No, what they do is DEPRIVE someone ELSE from the chance of having a living wage job and practically make someone else LOWER their salary expectations in order to get a job. So, in fact, they are screwing other people, overworking themselves and are creating an environment where the salaries are pressured to fall instead of rise.

I’d expect a “look, I like more money and since I CAN do it, then I will” and I have no problem with someone doing that, but I’d draw the line in trying to pretend that there are some “high moral values” where there are none, which just makes them look like a bunch of greedy morons trying to make “extreme wage slaving” into looking cool and “robin hood freedom-like”. :roll_eyes:

Even in amazing dystopias like “The doomed city” by the Strugatsky brothers, the people retained the ability to go home after work and rest. And if they want to live like that, fine by me , but at least they can spare us the beautificating embellishment and putting on charity flair on something that has none. :stuck_out_tongue:

I would expect that eventually this will lead in to a new class system.
The ones that can work remotely and the ones that will have to still go out there.
Considering that the ones that work remotely seem to also be making the better money, I do not see that going too well for society.

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Apparently google can cut people’s pay for opting to work from home.

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Hm. I’ve always lived in the city, and never had a good reason to move away, so I’m still here (in Berlin). 15 to 20 years ago, housing in Berlin was btw very inexpensive, but that has changed, unfortunately.
But even though I generally work from home, and my husband also doesn’t need to live here for his job, I don’t want to go away to the countryside. I have friends and family here. I value the great infrastructure, especially the public transport - we don’t need a car, which also saves a lot of money. Also, if you need any medical specialists, it’s better to live in the city. And I would also fear getting into a more conservative environment when moving. So moving to the countryside is not even a serious option for me.

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are we sure he isnt a time traveller

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See Clifford Simak’s “Huddling Place” (1944), one of the City stories.

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In the U.S. there is a trend, which is even a political goal discussed in a two-part article in Science News as far back as the 1990s, of destroying the suburbs and rural areas to force everyone to live in urban areas. In the suburbs this is being done by rezoning to allow greater residential density, and in the rural areas it is being done by eliminating tax credits for various categories of agricultural land use. The latter forces small farmers and people who grow and harvest trees in rotation to subdivide and sell off their agricultural property, or to sell out completely since they no longer have a livelihood (or an important supplement to their retirement income). One can see it year after year: urban sprawl is galloping by design.

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In some cases even more radical things happen to cause this, like the latest fire in my island. It was so massive in scale that now thousands of people lost their houses or their livelihood or both. Given the nature of forests, which take many decades to be restored, all those people cannot ever hope to ever see their old life restored no matter how much money goes into the placating “restoration packages” (which will never happen, but that is a different facet of that problem).

They or their children will be forced to go urban, eventually. :confused:

Same thing can also be said about other natural or not-so-natural destructions that eventually can turn previously fertile and lucrative land to a “not-worth-it” venture.

When I was a kid the word “decentralization” was all the rage, meaning a nation-wide policy to reduce the large cities of Athens and Thessaloniki and give incentives to young people to stay in the countryside. I was never aware if that policy ever really turned into practice, but in effect it was just idle talk since despite the proclamations the central government did all it could to dissuade people from staying in the countryside.

I admit that I have yet to find a reason for that trend or why the government would want such a thing, but each year that something happens to push more people away from a rural setting/life the more the word Trantor comes to my mind (to keep up with the topic).

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Can’t wait for a living skin covered AI robot to look after me:

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Lester del Rey wrote a classic story about falling in love with a robot back in 1938, Helen O’Loy. More crudely, a robot “vamp” appears in Metropolis (1926).

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Maybe I’m living the the past then!

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