wedrifid comments on Building Weirdtopia - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 January 2009 08:35PM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 14 December 2010 10:18:18AM 11 points [-]

Technological weirdtopia: (This is slightly similar to Eliezer's description of scientific weirdtopia but not quite.)

Each piece of technological equipment is only allowed to those people who've displayed sufficient mastery of the corresponding technology of the previous level. Nobody's allowed a car or motorbike, unless they've mastered driving a horsecart or riding a horse (or atleast a mule). Pens are only allowed if someone can write sufficiently well with quill-and-ink, matches and lighters are only permitted to those who've mastered usage of the flint-and-tinder. Pocket calculators are restricted to those mathematical operations that their user could (given sufficient time) work out with pen-and-paper.

The idea behind this is to increase appreciation of technology, and to also maintain an adequate level of knowledge in the population about former technical levels if there's a catastrophic collapse/decline in civilization that destroys more modern technology.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 December 2010 11:42:38AM 2 points [-]

That sounds like hacker heaven!

(Although I rather hope life a safety net of supporting technologies is in place!)