1 - "World police" tends to stick around, or soon comes back. (depending on how encumbering you define the "world"): US, British Empire, Rome, Ancient Persia, Chinese Dynasties. All have sought and won control of major parts of the world because it was beneficial to them and their trading partners.
2 - Sharing control of the internet with whom? China? Russia? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Cuba? The internet is fragmenting and soon each country will have their own local control. No need to share. (unfortunately)
3 - War is about power. As long as one person wants power, there will be war of some kind.
4 - Politics is also about power. As long as politicians have that power, they will seek to keep it (see also #3). See Venezuela for a current example of how sad this can get.
6 - Status, attention, and ego are just a few things that cannot be automated away. If your point were even remotely true, then the difference between a typical underpaid school teacher and Elon Musk (or Larry Ellison, or Donald Trump, etc.) would be trivial after the 100+ years of automation we've experienced.
Finally, collapse of empires tends to be followed by periods of lower economic output and higher violence; not to mention significant loss of knowledge. I'm not happy that we have one, but seeing it disappear could easily be worse.
2. What if, like blockchain, we build a DNS model that is server agnostic? People are already working on this, if you think it's not possible you should learn more.
3. That's not valid logic.
4. That's not valid logic.
6. [There seems to be no 5?] Historical fallacy.
The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?
1+2. One way or another, America will "stop playing world police". It might do things like adopt the metric system (depending on how long the "rugged independence" streak runs). U.S. climate policy is about as important to the world as Californian climate policy is to the rest of the country (near zero). The internet is already splintering into interlinked regional networks, and will continue to do so naturally.
3. War isn't inherently a way to enrich private entities, although it's clearly true that that's one effect of it, in this country right now (and arguably, currently the primary reason). War has been a constant reality, at least since the time humans began agriculture. Maybe it'll go away in the future, but I see no evidence of it.
4. One over-arching nation, with some division of regional governments. Conflict will just move down the tree.
5. A single, universal language isn't an inherently good thing. It sounds like a great way to kill off cultural diversity.
6. We'll have to change the nature of the human animal. We're naturally prone to categorizing, ranking, organizing, and using those structures to assess threat levels. Denying that is fighting nature; you won't win that war.
> The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?
True, true. Things will change. They'll follow the path of least resistance, on the macro and micro levels. Your 6 steps are fighting entropy the whole way. They're radical claims. Radical claims require radical evidence...do you have any?
I'm sure people argued the American economy would collapse without slave labor.
And America not being world police isn't a revolutionary change, we only started being world police in the last 70 years or so, and it's done more harm than good realistically.
I'm unclear what your defeatist motivation is, but it doesn't seem like you've actually sincerely thought this through.
> 6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.
We already have excess of some things such as calories and clean clothing. The cost of 2k calories per day is a pretty small fraction of minimum wage. We are also witnessing a rise in food classism that is targeted at the foods that are hard to bring the price down on. It has become a status symbol to "know where your food comes from" or to eat at a "farm to table" restaurant. These are associated with ways to get your calories that have high logistical & labor costs.
I agree that we will see eras of excess in more and more goods and services, but the idea that humans won't find a way to show superiority or class by consuming higher cost goods/services seems kind of out of touch.
For the record, these places were Russian sphere of influence before the conflicts started. Though not strictly Russian territory, indeed.
Our current foreign policy is far from ideal, but there is a delicate global balance which would be dangerously upset if we ceased global operations and "world policing." The GP is niave to think that such rosy, utopian intentions would not be taken advantage of by other global players. Look, for instance, at the current posturing by China in the Pacific. Imagine the scaling of their operations if there was no one in our position to apply pressure against them.
Someday, sure. But, globally, humans are still viciously tribal, and some form of enforcement keeps everything running smoothly for everyone. And while Americans foot much of the bill, there is no denying that our benefit is of larger proportion as well.
"Now is the perfect time to close the Suez Canal" "Now is the perfect time to invade South Korea" "Now is the perfect time to plunder any ship with cargo" "Now is the perfect time to take Qatar"
The reality is, America's military presence abroad is a stabilising force. Take that away and other powers will move in to fill the vacuum.
Yes, how do we do this? I'd like to see us declare victory, and remove our troops from South Korea, Japan, Germany, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and everywhere else. The UK did essentially this over the course of the 20th century. Is there any way to accelerate the process without world wars?
Does anyone have examples of groups working "together" that share one common interest, and are opposed on many other fronts?
Also does post war mean war never again happens? Or just happens less frequently?
I truly believe a post war era (war not happening for millions of years) will not be possible without genetic mutation of the human genome.
It's very possibly an asteroid could strike us and we wouldn't even be aware of it till after the fact, or at the very least till a week or two before it strikes... if it's in one of our blind spots (i.e. the other 95% of the sky)
If other planets/moons/whatever haven't been colonized by the time humanity gets empirical data for that hypothesis, a lot of people are going to wish they'd put that a little higher on the list.
Perhaps Chinese would be a good choice.
I don't have the implementation details. But just to illustrate how doable it'd be, I'd suggest we take something neutral (like Esperanto) and every language start adding 20 Esperanto words to their language per year, with a plan to coalesce after 200 years.
40,000 shared words isn't a full language, but it's enough to make conversations and debates possible.
1. First America stops being world police.
2. America plays ball with rest of world (adopts metric system, becomes a leader in climate, shares control of internet, turns concern toward to real issues like asteroids, population growth, health issues, cyber security)
3. Citizens acknowledge that war is a tool for siphoning tax money into the coffers of people with connections/government-contracts, and move towards a post-war-era.
4. Citizens start to move to a post-nation era, where we acknowledge have more in common with each other than our own politicians who drive us apart for financial gain.
5. We move toward universalizing language, so we hit a point that declaring war with Iraq seems as absurd as declaring war with Canada.
6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.
[Link to Pentagon's study: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/download.cfm?q=1358]