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Worthless: 3D printing is nothing but a nerd fad that won't leave hobbyist workshops.

6 (3%)

Unimportant: 3D printing will become common but won't be useful for much other than tiny full plastic objects.

8 (4%)

Minor Importance: 3D printing will function as a light industry that will coexist with existing manufacturing methodologies.

43 (21.4%)

Moderate Importance: 3D printing will challenge and slowly replace a large number of existing manufacturing businesses.

104 (51.7%)

Major Importance: 3D printing will completely flip the table on conventional manufacturing and quickly destroy existing business for anything you can make with them.

20 (10%)

Critical: 3D printing will disrupt conventional ideals of work and money so much that they collapse and are replaced in a paradigm shift.

20 (10%)

Total Members Voted: 199

[forsaken1111]

The whole point of drone warfare is to send cheap replaceable machines out instead of expensive and irreplacable young men and women to fight those who would rather see us all dead.

Why should we waste good men and women on war when we don't have to?

[Frumple]

Fairly sure the stock response to that question is that so we won't start viewing war as, well, cheap. If there is a great cost to action of great consequence, then that action will be more carefully considered before performed.

Or so the hypothetical goes, anyway.

[forsaken1111]

Fairly sure the stock response to that question is that so we won't start viewing war as, well, cheap. If there is a great cost to action of great consequence, then that action will be more carefully considered before performed.

Or so the hypothetical goes, anyway.

So we should sacrifice people to war because you feel like we might lose perspective?

Its silly wrongheaded thinking. War costs us a lot now, it always has, and that has never once stopped us from going to war.

I don't think war should be necessary, but I also don't think I should have to pay tolls to use state roads when I already pay state taxes and taxes on gas to upkeep those roads. What I think matters very little in the long run, but if there is any way at all to save the lives of my fellow service members and allow a robot to 'die' in their place, I am 100% for it.

[Eagleon]

If anything, I feel the threat of chemical terrorism is going down, not up. You used to be able to step in a drugstore and buy pretty much any chemical you wanted to. Not anymore.

For now, it's gone down significantly, yeah. People are aware of the threat, or at the very least they're aware that bulk chemicals = meth. There are more obscure production steps that could rely on very simple chemical precursors that you can't really regulate without banning things like sugar, table salt, certain minerals, etc. People get creative. The limitation to that creativity is that specialty glassware is expensive, difficult to use properly, and suspicious to buy in large quantities. Plastic is another limiting device here, but glass is actually a pretty nice candidate for home 3d printing.

Fairly sure the stock response to that question is that so we won't start viewing war as, well, cheap. If there is a great cost to action of great consequence, then that action will be more carefully considered before performed.

Or so the hypothetical goes, anyway.

And thinking about the amount of money the military pumps into their contracts due to labor and bidding overhead kind of makes it a hell of a lot scarier.

[Frumple]

So we should sacrifice people to war because you feel like we might lose perspective?

Fairly sure there's a reason I used "stock response" in that, hum. Personally, I'm entirely aware that perspective of that sort was lost a long damn time ago. I can understand why some folks don't want to further exaggerate that problem, though.

Because it's not entirely wrong thinking, really. There's a fairly extreme difference between human and material cost, and people are generally a lot less comfortable spending the former. Making war cost even less of the former would indeed most likely further undermine perspective. Some people actually care about their sons and daughters, but they're a lot less likely to raise a fuss over another penny on the dollar or whathaveyou. So theoretically, when your course of action is going to threaten the former, you pay a hell of a lot more attention to what you're intending to do.

Doesn't actually work that way, but that's how the thinking goes insofar as I'm aware.

[forsaken1111]

Historically, technological advances of any kind have led to greater casualties, not less. Its never stopped them happening and its never stopped war happening.

Really we just need to all pour resources into colonization and give every country its own damn planet so we can all leave each other alone in peace.

[miauw62]

Thing is, should casualties be expressed relative to the total population? (And if so, the total population of what?)

[Lagslayer]

Historically, technological advances of any kind have led to greater casualties, not less. Its never stopped them happening and its never stopped war happening.

Really we just need to all pour resources into colonization and give every country its own damn planet so we can all leave each other alone in peace.

I doubt this will work. It never worked in the past when we still had ungoldly amounts of space here on earth to colonize. Moving it to outer space won't change much in the long run.

[DWC]

I still occasionally get pulled into debates over that comment. Most recently I was accused of being historically inaccurate as to the motivations of Ned Ludd.

Though upon further reflection you could think of Miriam as a kind of Luddite, in the sense that while Ned Ludd tried to destroy stocking frames to keep his job Miriam is trying to destroy transhuman technologies in order to keep humanity around.

That's an interesting idea. I've noticed a lot of left-leaning technocrat types normally embrace transhumanist type technologies, except when it comes to remote control aircraft for whatever reason. You'd think a future where wars are fought with tiny unmanned robots in space would be wonderful, right? It just seems to me that the right wing conspiracy theorists and left wing conspiracy theorists are just drinking each other's Koolaid too often.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Historically, technological advances of any kind have led to greater casualties, not less. Its never stopped them happening and its never stopped war happening.

You've got this completely and utterly backwards. You know how we have a concept of total war these days? That didn't used to be the case. Nobody used the idea of total war because all war was total war. Siege the city, eventually break in, kill whomever you want and take what/whomever you want, victory.


Even as recently as WWII we had extremely wide warfare. Some cities were firebombed so much they ceased to exist, and while perfectly acceptable then such a thing is unpalatable for even the most reactionary military figures now. How do you think the world would have reacted if the US had responded to 9/11 by dropping white phosphorous and MOABs on Kabul until there was no structures standing and nothing alive in the spot where it once stood? Yet there are people alive today who were around in a time where such a reaction would have been not only accepted but welcomed.

Technology is a catalyst for both narrow war and the obsolescence of war (through reducing the avenues that lead to conflict in the first place).

I've noticed a lot of left-leaning technocrat types normally embrace transhumanist type technologies, except when it comes to remote control aircraft for whatever reason. You'd think a future where wars are fought with tiny unmanned robots in space would be wonderful, right? It just seems to me that the right wing conspiracy theorists and left wing conspiracy theorists are just drinking each other's Koolaid too often.

Well, I'm a democrat, not a technocrat, though I am a left-wing transhumanist. I'm fine with drone aircraft so long as they're available to everyone (not the armed variant, obviously). I am significantly less fine with a totalitarian AI controlling an entire city, as shown in Self-Aware Colony.

[kaian-a-coel]

Historically, technological advances of any kind have led to greater casualties, not less.

Turn on your TV and look at the news. Chances are that you will soon see a ceremony for some fallen soldiers. My point? In modern wars, we, as a civilization, have the luxury to individually mourn every single one of the soldiers that die on duty, or even off duty. And not even from your own country, but from its allies as well.
I am fully pacifist, but I know my history, and in the past news were about thousands, or tens of thousands of deaths, or about great generals' deaths. Today, every lowly trooper is honoured by his/her nation, individually. Which means that 1)The number of casualties is low enough so we can afford to do that and 2)We value life enough to question the validity of a military action over a handful of deaths.

This isn't perfect, but damn, we're close.

[forsaken1111]

There has been no war like the previous world wars in which our modern technology for killing has been used. If it were, you wouldn't be able to mourn individuals. I was talking about war casualties, not peacetime casualties as you are.

[kaian-a-coel]

We are at f*****g war! soldiers fight and die, how is that not war?

[Frumple]

There has been no war like the previous world wars in which our modern technology for killing has been used. If it were, you wouldn't be able to mourn individuals. I was talking about war casualties, not peacetime casualties as you are.

Actually be a pretty interesting thing to see some numbers crunched on, methinks. Total casualties, military and otherwise, of varying similar-scale conflicts over the years. Quick searching's having some difficulty finding something like that, hum. Did find this, though. Which is somewhat interesting.

As for the news thing... I'd call that a pretty poor heuristic to use. They tend to not even remotely cover all the military casualties and not even touch the civilian ones caused by the various conflicts. Also a fairly interesting thing to glance over.

[SalmonGod]

War will never be about robots fighting robots without human casualties.  War is when powerful people decide they want something, and other people are standing in the way.  When one side's robots slaughters the other side's robots, the people will still be there and still need to be dealt with. 

The thing that's changing most about war is it's tightening its focus on information control and ideology.  Instead of crushing an enemy group and pillaging all its resources, the pillaging is now the default never-ending state of affairs, fully institutionalized in the functioning of the global economy.  War is the constant vigilance of electronic information filters and millions of cameras keeping an eye out for anyone who raises a fuss about the situation, and silencing them.

We value life enough to question the validity of a military action over a handful of deaths.

Only if those deaths are one's own soldiers or allies.  The farther removed military personnel are from the consequences of their actions, the less hesitant they are about collateral damage, so long as it's "them".  I don't think soldiers tend to laugh when they're shooting people with a gun in their hands.  They do when they're shooting people via remote control and only have to see it through a monitor.