[HN Gopher] Manna - Two Views of Humanity's Future (2003)
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Manna - Two Views of Humanity's Future (2003)
Author : thesuperbigfrog
Score : 26 points
Date : 2024-10-04 17:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marshallbrain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marshallbrain.com)
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| I was told this was a science fiction novel, but it reads more
| like a bulleted list of socialist talking points.
| sgarland wrote:
| In the story, the utopia was gained by purchasing land as a
| group, and then sharing its resources. What a frightening
| concept!
| pixl97 wrote:
| "The capitalists are surely going to treat me well after they
| can replace my labor with robots"
| jpm_sd wrote:
| (2003)
|
| This is 20yr old and wasn't that good in the first place. Star
| Trek and Iain Banks did it better IMHO
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Title updated with year.
|
| I did not realize that it was that old.
| ihumanable wrote:
| I read this many years ago. I do think for being written in
| 2003 it's interesting to read again now and see in the last 20
| years what parts seem more or less plausible.
|
| I think the nice thing about science fiction is that even bad
| science fiction can contain within interesting ideas. Sorta
| like pizza, even bad pizza is pretty good.
| mooreds wrote:
| Love this story. Yes, it is a bit heavy handed, but prescient in
| some of the ways that society has evolved in response to more and
| more automation. The alternate future is a bit pollyanna but
| worth considering.
|
| After all the 40 hour work week isn't a law of nature either.
| fouc wrote:
| I've always thought the headset with Manna giving directions
| was just a fancy way of working from a checklist/todolist with
| a bit of context awareness/smarts/and gamification perhaps.
|
| We can probably implement a "personal-Manna" with today's tech.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Manna - Two Views of Humanity 's Future_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40780701 - June 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Manna - Two Views of Humanity 's Future (2003)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40446197 - May 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Manna - Two Views of Humanity 's Future (2003)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39992324 - April 2024 (2
| comments)
|
| _Marshall Brain 's "Manna" (2003)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39406702 - Feb 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Manna - Two Views of Humanity's Future_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24866389 - Oct 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Manna by Marshall Brain_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9547327 - May 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _Manna_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206184 - March
| 2015 (1 comment)
|
| _Manna, Chapter One_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828736 - July 2011 (1
| comment)
| fouc wrote:
| I'm rather surprised there hasn't been much discussion on Manna
| before, such a great novella.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of
| businesses that operated in this way.
|
| According to Ibis World there are "only" 548,062 Global fast food
| restaurants businesses worldwide in 2024.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.ibisworld.com/global/number-of-
| businesses/global...
| Terr_ wrote:
| How does that matter? The sentence doesn't actually say
| "millions of _fast-food_ businesses ", it's emphasizing the
| popularity of a manager/employee work relationship without
| being limited to fast-food.
|
| Also, the word "business" is often used in a way that refers to
| particular stores or sites, rather than always meaning a top-
| level corporate legal-ownership entity. You can point at a
| local boarded-over Starbucks and say "that business closed"
| without meaning a global shutdown.
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| I always had a cynical thought -- what if, after he got the brain
| stem implant and entered the post scarcity voluntary cooperative
| paradise, his body was really right back in the warehouse doing
| drudge labour while he experienced a simulation of utopia?
| criddell wrote:
| You might enjoy the series Severance on Apple TV. It's one of
| my favorite TV shows of the past 5 years.
| bckr wrote:
| Ah, I should keep watching that. I don't think I finished the
| first season yet. Maybe because it's horrifying and bleak
| time0ut wrote:
| I've read this a few times over the years. Always amusing to
| experience the shift from totally believable to totally absurd as
| the second view is presented.
| zem wrote:
| people who like this might like ernest callenbach's "ecotopia"
| (from 1975), and cory doctorow's "walkaway", which cover some of
| the same themes.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Another fun read from Marshall Brain: "The Second Intelligent
| Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches"
| available on Amazon.
| WillAdams wrote:
| It's a story I cite fairly often.
|
| A few others which examine this sort of thing are:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella)
|
| - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo (originally published as:
| https://qntm.org/lena )
|
| and I can never miss a chance to recommend "Raindrop" from Hal
| Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_)
|
| At some point in the future one hopes that a technology will be
| developed which allows doing more than just pillaging the earth's
| resources for some additional comfort/convenience/energy,
| agriculture and improvements on it would be that, except that by
| making Malthus wrong, they've just increased the number of people
| for whom problems need to be resolved --- computing had the
| potential to do this, but the discussion about taxing CPUs to
| fund a universal basic income or even job re-training for
| displaced workers never got out the gate --- solar may be the
| first such, but it really needs more adoption, and an
| implementation which doesn't depend on batteries which added a
| fifth item to the resources humans plunder:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world
|
| (the newcomer is lithium, the others were sand, salt, copper, and
| oil)
|
| We keep crossing tipping points which no one talks about much:
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
|
| and folks have been writing science fiction stories on this sort
| of thing since _Make Room, Make Room!_ (and the public is
| moderately familiar with the movie version _Soylent Green_)
|
| What technologies or social changes offer an escape hatch?
|
| - cold fusion?
|
| - making limestone out of CO2 in warm moist air (needs abundant
| energy and either an affordable/available reagent or a new
| process)
|
| - switching folks from eating beef to something else?
|
| - desalination (needs abundant energy, and a compleatness which
| will prevent issues such as:
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S106422931502009X )
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