Your first point makes me realize that gene therapy or something of the sort for cat-level night vision would be really cool.
Wouldn't it? I think it's proscribed by the terms of the thought experiment, but if it weren't I'd include an option to subsidize the creation of a working tapetum lucidum in whoever wants one.
I'm not very sure that the reason we have industrial concentrated agriculture is lack of the right plants and knowledge of how to make them tasty.
Kind of missing my point, though my point is sorta nested under layers of assumptions in that particular case. Lemme take you through it.
I live in a cold climate with extreme seasonal variation. Winters here are very harsh. But I can buy bananas at the grocery store whenever I want, anytime. (This is for really weird, complex historical and geopolitical reasons that I'm prone to rambling about in their own right, but we'll ignore that for now.)
And that's good, if you think about it, because there's very little fruit here that grows under agricultural conditions, let alone wild ones. Oh, there's been progress made in cold-climate cultivars of apple, pear and a few other things here, but those are all very recent developments. Forget citrus, forget bananas. If you want your vitamins, you need fruits and veggies (or organ meats, but those are not a common element of the mainstream diet here). However, the climate is wholly unsuited to producing them for most of the year, and we have a short growing season even when it happens.
Under the current system, we mostly grow corn and soy, and sell it to people far away. That's economically productive, but it takes a lot of land. It also depends on a huge, massive global trade network reliant on just-in-time delivery and a consume, consume, consume mindset in the relevant trade partners and their cultural substrate. That particular thing is what I see as part of the problem that needs solving -- not trade itself, not even long-distance trade; those are good things -- just the relevant complex of players, relationships and motives and its direct and external effects on much of what I value.
My priorities are roughly as follows:
-Increase resilience (failures of the just-in-time delivery system are disastrous; monocultures are fragile) and sustainability
-Enrich local cultures and make them more fun and interesting, and more distinctive.
-Encourage diverse, robust and complex polycultures with narrower peaks and valleys over just-good-enough monocultures that either boom or bust.
-Make it so that the majority of local inhabitants of a region can have a life worth living where they're at, regardless of available opportunities to leave and explore or settle someplace else.
That suggests to me that the current approach to food production in my home area is not gonna fly under the system I'm thinking of. The problem is that climate is a serious impediment to alternatives. Not an absolute barrier -- there have been a lot of human beings living here since long before the settlers arrived, in conditions of relative abundance even -- but still a significant one given the current population. Basically, land use patterns gotta shift, and for that to really work out okay in a place that spends most of the year agriculturally fallow, we need a more varied diet that makes better use of local and seasonal resources and doesn't share the mainstream culture's resistance, aversion or neglect toward certain types of food.
What I have in mind is something like permaculture food forests, supplemented with lower-key, locally-focused agriculture and greenhouses, as well as sustainable harvest of wild resources. A bit of farming, a bit of foraging, a bit of high-tech, a bit of permaculture. I envision the results looking a bit like this: http://troutcaviar.blogspot.com/
HERE ARE THE CONSTRAINTS: Assume for the time being that it will forever remain beyond the scope of science to change Human Nature. AGI is also impossible, as is Nanotech, BioImmortality, and those things.
Your first point makes me realize that gene therapy or something of the sort for cat-level night vision would be really cool.
Wouldn't it? I think it's proscribed by the terms of the thought experiment, but if it weren't I'd include an option to subsidize the creation of a working tapetum lucidum in whoever wants one.
Biological tinkering, so long as...
Assume for the time being that it will forever remain beyond the scope of science to change Human Nature. AGI is also impossible, as is Nanotech, BioImmortality, and those things.
Douglas Adams mice finished their human experiment, giving to you, personally, the job of redesigning earth, and specially human society, according to your wildest utopian dreams, but you can't change the unchangeables above.
You can play with architecture, engineering, gender ratio, clothing, money, science grants, governments, feeding rituals, family constitution, the constitution itself, education, etc... Just don't forget if you slide something too far away from what our evolved brains were designed to accept, things may slide back, or instability and catastrophe may ensue.
Finally, if you are not the kind of utilitarian that assigns exactly the same amount of importance to your desires, and to that of others, I want you to create this Utopia for yourself, and your values, not everyone.
The point of this exercise is: The vast majority of folk not related to this community that I know, when asked about an ideal world, will not change human nature, or animal suffering, or things like that, they'll think about changing whatever the newspaper editors have been writing about last few weeks. I am wondering if there is symmetry here, and folks from this community here do not spend that much time thinking about those kinds of change which don't rely on transformative technologies. It is just an intuition pump, a gedankenexperiment if you will. Force your brain to face this counterfactual reality, and make the best world you can given those constraints. Maybe, if sufficiently many post here, the results might clarify something about CEV, or the sociology of LessWrongers...