Tag: Singularity’s Children

Time’s up for the Plutocrats?

Cartoon by:  MATT WUERKER

 

If you’ve read my books, you will know one of the themes is wealth-inequality and the future of our society. The bad guys are the Old Guard—privileged plutocrats; while the good guys are fresh young anarchist privileged plutocrats… plus a bunch of hackers, dolphins and rogue AIs.

I started writing the series in 2008 against the backdrop of what felt like a significant financial collapse and the stirrings of a grass-roots response.

The time felt ripe then. The 99%, Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to have identified the source of the problem… but then, somehow, we got distracted by political correctness and divided for a decade… I blame plutocrat-puppeted social media troll-farms sponsored by the 1%, but that’s another book…

I am not against extreme wealth. I think striving for your own Lamborghini or Private Island is a good motivator for the hyper-talented. But the people at the bottom need to live a dignified life too.

We should always try to create a world, where, if the cards were dealt differently, we would still be comfortable at the bottom. This is just smart. You never know when you or your children might fall on hard times.

I live in Switzerland, and reducing poverty is one of the stated goals of our social-security system. Switzerland is not short on Billionaires, and our tax rate is very bearable, but we do have a wealth tax and a high minimum wage. This pays for a system that ensures that even the most hard up citizens will be provided education, healthcare, food and a roof over their heads.

The choice is pretty simple:

 

Some pieces I have read recently that make the optimist in me hope there is a new glimmering of awareness!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/abolish-billionaires-tax.html
https://eand.co/young-people-are-giving-on-capitalism-because-capitalism-failed-young-people-70b4f0ab3de

Tech from Singularity’s Children: 3D Printing Organs in Space

3D Tissue Printing in Space is another technology I play with in my Singularity’s Children books.

The ultra-rich have found a new way to stave of a visitation from the grim-reaper by packing themselves in gelly and shooting themselves into orbit. There, cloning, cybernetics, and 3D tissue printing can fashion them new bodies.

FT – Small ‘organoids’ grown in the lab could be used to treat chronic conditions

In Space, the printer can place cells anywhere without worrying about gravity deforming the growing wet blob. Nutrients can be misted across the pulsing membranes as a new vessel for an oligarchs consciousness takes shape…

Once the body is done and ready for a freshly scooped out brain, all the fiddly neural wiring can be handled by software. Bulk connections are made in the brain-stem and dynamically mapped to sensations or actions in the synthetic body.

That’s the SciFi, this is the fact:

“In the microgravity environment, cells exhibit spatially unrestricted growth and assemble into complex 3D aggregates, in contrast to typical growth in monolayer (2D) cultures as occurs on Earth. For over two decades, investigations conducted in space and on Earth have shown that 3D culture supports the generation of tissue-like characteristics in vitro that are more biologically representative of native in vivo-like cell growth and function.” 3dprint.com