lemans66
It all sounds good if thing were like star trek but people are greedy and if they don't learn to be happy with what they get then they will be loosing jobs. With the unions help they are pricing themselves out of work the union says strike and they do and several propped loose there jobs everytime the pay wage goes up then people get laid off.
there were some disturbing aspects to Star Trek society. They were subtle, but it became more obvious as the characters drifted away from Officers. Like, you could have "anything you wanted" with a replicator, but the replicator was locked out of making weapons...yet the re enactment holodeck adventures consistently had replicated components including things like rapiers or muskets or 1911 pistols for things like Swashbuckling or Detect Novel stories. Phasers were locked up for a portion of the population, but ubiquitous for others, like half the cast on away teams. I noticed one of the episodes had a guy falsely accused of hacking the replicators to make a gun to kill people, but the actual person guilty was someone who was an officer and had security clearance to not only make the replicator work, but also wipe the memory of their use of the device. The worst part was the fact that it was a personal agenda.
I think when you start to make super societies and claim everyone is equal, making some people "more equal than others" like limiting who gets to produce what, or who gets to own what, you actually just create dilemmas where injustice is more easily produced.
In Elysium, there was a techie guy as the protagonist, but even though he worked on the robot police, he was still bullied by them, harassed by them, injured for no reason by them, and didn't have the same medical benefits as the people in the space colony, the colony that wouldn't even be possible without workers like him working on the robots and other machines.
The natural assumption of most people is no such welfare program, much less a welfare plus program. They figure purging the population is the solution, or enslaving the bulk of the population and then living in some orbital or skyscraper paradise. Many people in power promoting this technological future where the majority are obsolete and unemployable want more than 90% of the population living in a graffiti covered urban bomb zone. They literally see themselves up in a tower or restaurant somewhere sipping Champagne, Mimosa, or Prosecco, looking out a window, looking down at their social inferiors. Many of them look forward to a return of illiteracy and simplified, gutter-trash language, disease, rotting teeth, and extremely shortened lifespan for these people.
Psychologically, the lower the living standards and intellectual or physical development of their inferiors, the more superior they can feel for even less effort. I think that power trip pushes them to imagine themselves as Gods to men, and seeing themselves as men, would like to perceive the lower classes as insects and vermin.
It is imperative that better conditions for the masses are planned now, before the automated society that comes irreversibly locks in a Dystopian and largely unnecessary Caste system with 0 social mobility.
