Civilization and the market place can be seen as a cyclic process of converting resources into commodities usable by the population, which then exits the population as waste products and is recycled into the resource pool. While the transition between resource and commodity is a human controlled, rapidly changing process, the transition between commodity and waste has largely been a natural, unchanging, and slow process.
We must recognize the existence of technological unemployment. Back in the ages of industrial and agricultural revolution, technology displaced laborers and farmers. These laborers and farmers later went on to fill in other jobs that technology made possible. Modern jobs, from IT worker to electrician, were brought into the world by technology because consumers were at such a technologically advanced point where they demanded such services.
Thus, I like to see the job market as a pyramid: as technology fills in the lower rows of the pyramid (such as crop growing), the upper rows (such as any white collar job) can be filled in by people. People are pushed up the pyramid of jobs by technology filling in the lower tiers.
The pyramid can also expand in size. Say it takes 10 workers to farm a crop and 1 to refine it into food. A machine is brought in (for simplicity's sake, it requires no maintenance) that replaces these 10 workers. Now we have 10 additional workers available to refine the food, but we only need one. Either we can fire 10 workers, or we can bring in 10 more farming machines that do the job of 110 workers, and have 11 workers available for refining the crop into food. So before the machines came, there were 10 workers farming and 1 worker refining. When the machines came along, there were 11 machines (worth 110 workers) farming and 11 refining. Now we have more food and no unemployment. This is how the pyramid can expand in size.
Now, the pyramid is limited to how much it can expand in size. If there aren't enough resources for 11 machines to farm and 11 workers to refine, workers will have to be fired, or fill in even higher jobs up the pyramid of jobs. Furthermore, if there aren't enough consumers to buy that many resources, the same result will happen. It has traditionally been that more resources begets more people (workers and consumers).
Let's take this pyramid analogy to the macroeconomic scale. As technology displaces workers, workers will either move up and up the pyramid (if resources remain the same) or up and across the pyramid (if the resource increases and the pyramid expands). Let's keep in mind that there is a finite amount of resources on Earth but so far, the population has been increasing exponentially as well as our technological progress.
We are so far up this pyramid of workers being displaced by technology that workers are starting to compete with technology to fill in gaps of inefficiency. While the technology for a fully automated fast food restaurant may exist, employers may find it cheaper to employ workers at minimum wage.
Thus, society will start to look at the other side of the cycle: instead of focusing on turning resources into commodities, society will start looking into turning waste back into resources. Currently, our methods of recycling are still largely natural, primitive, and inefficient. But the trend has been and will continue to be emphasis on recycling.
Eventually, civilization will reach the point where the pyramid can no longer expand in size because it is efficiently turning all of the Earth's resources into commodities and all of the consumer waste into resources. Maybe we will reach the point where (solar) energy is simply not enough to turn Earth into a near 100% efficient cyclic process of resources to commodities to waste to resources (we'll call this cyclic efficiency). By this time, maybe technology has displaced every single worker, and now all that remains are consumers. Considering there is only a finite amount of resources, there can only be a finite amount of consumers.
From here: we have two options. Either population growth halts (intentionally or not), or we find more resources. While the first option can manifest in several forms, from sustained birth control to apocalyptic world wars over resources to matrix-like robotic takeovers (all of which can come long before we near 100% cyclic efficiency), the second option will indisputably be space travel. By this point, we may have mastered fusion: we don't need to look for planets that can sustain life, just elements and molecules that we can convert into useful resources. Heck, by this point, it is likely that we will have reached matrix-like self induced technological singularity and no longer require commodities: just hard drive space to store our virtual civilization.
This whole thing may remind you of the Kardashev Scale, aka the stages of civilization.
Now let me remind/enlighten you that it is, by some, considered likely that advanced civilization should have existed before us and that it puzzles us that we have not made contact (not even indirect) with an alien Type II or III civilization. Statistically, intelligent life could and should have existed elsewhere in the Milky Way before us. Assuming intelligent life existed, there must be some incredibly strong factor that prevents intelligent life from becoming a Type II or III civilization.
In my next blog post (who knows when that will come, it's almost finals after all and I need to write a speech and do a project by tomorrow), I will explore what may prevent Type 0 and I civilizations from progressing onto Type II and III civilizations.
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Note to self: Explore the following:
Technological singularity and lack of motivation to explore space for resources (pyramid expands)
Catastrophic events such as world wars and robotic takeover (pyramid collapses, or civilization is the cycle of pyramid expanding and collapsing)
Sustained birth control (the pyramid stops expanding and does not collapse)
Which is more likely?
Monday, November 26, 2012
Cold Turkeying Gaming: My Experience Thus Far
So it's been roughly a week and a half ever since I stopped gaming. I'm pretty sure there are a million confounding factors here, the main one being that I am in a balls to the walls awesome college, but life without gaming has been pretty darn enjoyable thus far.
I do miss gaming, but the alternative to gaming is nice. I don't think I could have cold turkeyed if I tried doing it without the college experience. Instead of being up until 3AM gaming, I'm meeting on average 20 new people a day and am spending time with all of them, from rock climbing to eating late night dinner. There's simply not enough downtime to do any gaming, and I can't game even if I wanted to because I left my desktop with all my games on it at home. So I either end up studying at the library while my friends are still in class or hanging out with my friends when they are not.
That said, gaming is fun as fuck. Because of this, I get bored as fuck without games around me. To make up for my lack of games, I go out often with the friends I've made at college.
To those about to start fall quarter who've spent the summer gaming, I suggest you to uninstall everything, from Steam to Origin. Get a laptop that can't handle gaming, a Macbook, or an ultrabook if you wish. Once you don't game for a few busy days as you move in, you'll forget how much you loved gaming.
There is nothing wrong with loving your games, but if you're somewhat addicted like me and have been spending 4 or more hours a day just gaming, distancing yourself from your computer may lead to a pretty social life.
You're not going to miss anything by not playing your games, but college is a once in a lifetime experience.
Note: Forgot to publish this when I typed it in September, so I'm publishing it in late November.
I do miss gaming, but the alternative to gaming is nice. I don't think I could have cold turkeyed if I tried doing it without the college experience. Instead of being up until 3AM gaming, I'm meeting on average 20 new people a day and am spending time with all of them, from rock climbing to eating late night dinner. There's simply not enough downtime to do any gaming, and I can't game even if I wanted to because I left my desktop with all my games on it at home. So I either end up studying at the library while my friends are still in class or hanging out with my friends when they are not.
That said, gaming is fun as fuck. Because of this, I get bored as fuck without games around me. To make up for my lack of games, I go out often with the friends I've made at college.
To those about to start fall quarter who've spent the summer gaming, I suggest you to uninstall everything, from Steam to Origin. Get a laptop that can't handle gaming, a Macbook, or an ultrabook if you wish. Once you don't game for a few busy days as you move in, you'll forget how much you loved gaming.
There is nothing wrong with loving your games, but if you're somewhat addicted like me and have been spending 4 or more hours a day just gaming, distancing yourself from your computer may lead to a pretty social life.
You're not going to miss anything by not playing your games, but college is a once in a lifetime experience.
Note: Forgot to publish this when I typed it in September, so I'm publishing it in late November.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Wow, haven't been here in a while
Well, what prompted me to revisit this blog was some thinking I did while listening to some Touhou vocal remixes at work. This spiel is going to be about FANBASE AND FANWORK CENTERED AROUND GAMING IN JAPAN VS THE US
Author's note: I am assuming you are somewhat familiar with PC games such as TF2 and SC2 but somewhat unfamiliar with the Japanese Touhou and Vocaloid community.
Introduction
Games and other works of entertainment, whether made by a company or casually by an individual, has the potential to attract large amounts of fanbase. The interesting part is watching that single seed of work flourish into an immersing environment as talented and skilled fans add their own work to the artificial world.
Touhou
For those who are unfamiliar with what Touhou is, it is a Japanese, doujin (I guess you could roughly call it Indie in English) game created by this guy called ZUN. His real name is Junya Ota and you'll hear him referred to sometimes as Team Shanghi Alice even though he's the only one in this "team." While the game itself consists mostly of bullet hell PC games (think Invaders on steroids with anime style characters and professional-grade fireworks mixed together), there is a very active and large fanbase centered around Touhou. ZUN is quite popular because of the quality of the games he produces, roughly twice a year, in which he composes the music, writes the code, writes the story, and designs the characters of Touhou (all this he does in his free time). The fanbase has sprouted several offshoots and fanwork, from artwork, remixes, games centered around the Touhou storyline, to full blown animes (well maybe not full blown). ZUN is very open with Touhou's intellectual property and is heavily opposed to corporate interference. As such, pretty much everything related to Touhou is fan-produced. The quality and quantity of these productions are high enough that there is a fairly large convention held every year for the sole purpose of sharing Touhou related entertainment.
I want to say the world of Touhou has been growing both vertically, as ZUN comes out with more bullet hell games, and horizontally, as the fanbase contributes to the Touhou world, since the release of EoSD a decade ago (2002).
Here is a comical yet somewhat accurate Cracked article if you want some more quick info on Touhou.
Warcraft, DotA, Starcraft, and Source Simplified Rundown
DotA and Valve
When looking for a similarly made game and similarly enthusiastic fanbase in the U.S., I would probably have to say the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) and Valve playerbase (think Garry's Mod, HL, and TF2) come close (but not nearly as close enough, which I will explore further on in the article). Before I continue though, let me get Starcraft 1 and 2 out of the way.
Starcraft 2
I don't really want to touch on SC2 much in this article because of a few factors:
SC2 is viewed as an ESport, centered mostly around competitive gameplay and commentary. SC2 is a finished product, and no matter how popular SC2 custom games are, fans do not really contribute to expansion the Starcraft world. That's why it's called an ESport - it has commerical viability in the stadium and fans play it casually while they watch pros play it professionally, much like athletic sports such as Baseball. Maybe some friends will occasionally get together and watch SC2 streams at the bar. For the most part, SC2 is and has always been corporatized, with fan's contributions having mainly being monetary, whether directly or indirectly.
Back to DotA and Valve
Valve's fanbase and the fanbase's approach to expanding the Valve world as well as Valve's approach to expanding its own world has a distinctively American flavor. Here are three main components in how Valve's world is expanded:
ALRIGHT, so I started this blog post about one month ago and just revisited it. I lost my train of thought, so I'll make a temporary conclusion.
Basically, in the U.S./Valve, there is concrete infrastructure and is somewhat official. The difference is not only that SFM videos get posted onto YouTube and MMD videos get posted onto NikoDou, or that the U.S. fanbase is found primarily on 4chan or Reddit while Japan's is found on 2ch. There's an oddly different way in how the respective communities reach their fantasy and how their fantasies reach out to them. Both U.S. and Japan audiences work on expanding their fictional worlds, both in similar but different ways. In the U.S., Valve backed Dota 2 is gaining momentum with Starcraft like competitive scenes, while Japan focuses more on the entertainment than competitive aspect through events like Miku's virtual performances.
Author's note: I am assuming you are somewhat familiar with PC games such as TF2 and SC2 but somewhat unfamiliar with the Japanese Touhou and Vocaloid community.
Introduction
Games and other works of entertainment, whether made by a company or casually by an individual, has the potential to attract large amounts of fanbase. The interesting part is watching that single seed of work flourish into an immersing environment as talented and skilled fans add their own work to the artificial world.
Touhou
For those who are unfamiliar with what Touhou is, it is a Japanese, doujin (I guess you could roughly call it Indie in English) game created by this guy called ZUN. His real name is Junya Ota and you'll hear him referred to sometimes as Team Shanghi Alice even though he's the only one in this "team." While the game itself consists mostly of bullet hell PC games (think Invaders on steroids with anime style characters and professional-grade fireworks mixed together), there is a very active and large fanbase centered around Touhou. ZUN is quite popular because of the quality of the games he produces, roughly twice a year, in which he composes the music, writes the code, writes the story, and designs the characters of Touhou (all this he does in his free time). The fanbase has sprouted several offshoots and fanwork, from artwork, remixes, games centered around the Touhou storyline, to full blown animes (well maybe not full blown). ZUN is very open with Touhou's intellectual property and is heavily opposed to corporate interference. As such, pretty much everything related to Touhou is fan-produced. The quality and quantity of these productions are high enough that there is a fairly large convention held every year for the sole purpose of sharing Touhou related entertainment.
I want to say the world of Touhou has been growing both vertically, as ZUN comes out with more bullet hell games, and horizontally, as the fanbase contributes to the Touhou world, since the release of EoSD a decade ago (2002).
Here is a comical yet somewhat accurate Cracked article if you want some more quick info on Touhou.
Warcraft, DotA, Starcraft, and Source Simplified Rundown
- Warcraft is a RTS game developed by Blizzard. It currently has three major installments (WC1, 2, and 3). Warcraft (and Starcraft) each run on an engine that Blizzard has opened up for third parties to develop their own games on.
- Defense of the Ancients (DotA) was developed by an individual on Blizzard's open Warcraft engine.
- Starcraft is like Warcraft, a game also developed by Blizzard. It currently has two major installments (SC1 and 2).
- Team Fortress 2 (TF2), an FPS game, runs on the Source engine developed by Valve.
- DotA2 is DotA's successor. While the original DotA was made on Blizzard's Warcraft engine by a third party, DotA2 was made by Valve on Valve's Source engine.
DotA and Valve
When looking for a similarly made game and similarly enthusiastic fanbase in the U.S., I would probably have to say the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) and Valve playerbase (think Garry's Mod, HL, and TF2) come close (but not nearly as close enough, which I will explore further on in the article). Before I continue though, let me get Starcraft 1 and 2 out of the way.
Starcraft 2
I don't really want to touch on SC2 much in this article because of a few factors:
SC2 is viewed as an ESport, centered mostly around competitive gameplay and commentary. SC2 is a finished product, and no matter how popular SC2 custom games are, fans do not really contribute to expansion the Starcraft world. That's why it's called an ESport - it has commerical viability in the stadium and fans play it casually while they watch pros play it professionally, much like athletic sports such as Baseball. Maybe some friends will occasionally get together and watch SC2 streams at the bar. For the most part, SC2 is and has always been corporatized, with fan's contributions having mainly being monetary, whether directly or indirectly.
Back to DotA and Valve
Valve's fanbase and the fanbase's approach to expanding the Valve world as well as Valve's approach to expanding its own world has a distinctively American flavor. Here are three main components in how Valve's world is expanded:
- Steam Workshop: Here, fans can submit third party, cosmetic, in-game items as well as map mods for certain games for approval by fellow users. Once both Valve and those on the workshop approve an item, it is added into the Valve system, available for purchase or download by fellow Steam users. These items (which appear in TF2, DotA2, and Portal) have monetary value and can be traded, while game mods function like patches to a particular game.
- Source Filmmaker: Is analogous to the MikuMikuDance that is sometimes used to recreate and animate Touhou characters. Both SFM and MMD users tend to focus on casual fanbase based humorous works or music videos.
___
Basically, in the U.S./Valve, there is concrete infrastructure and is somewhat official. The difference is not only that SFM videos get posted onto YouTube and MMD videos get posted onto NikoDou, or that the U.S. fanbase is found primarily on 4chan or Reddit while Japan's is found on 2ch. There's an oddly different way in how the respective communities reach their fantasy and how their fantasies reach out to them. Both U.S. and Japan audiences work on expanding their fictional worlds, both in similar but different ways. In the U.S., Valve backed Dota 2 is gaining momentum with Starcraft like competitive scenes, while Japan focuses more on the entertainment than competitive aspect through events like Miku's virtual performances.
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