User blog:Mr.Robbo/Free Co-operative Zone

Greetings, all!

I'm making a new civilisation called the 'Free Co-operative Zone', which I'm imagining as a kind of political and economic free zone (hence the unimaginative name). Since I have quite a sinmgular view about what an advanced, space-faring civilisation would be like, I'm going to make a table comparing the Zambarau Concord with my vision of the Free Co-operative Zone, for my benefit more than anyone else's.

When designing advanced civilisations I've always found that they always result in the inhabitants becoming obsolete; the place is run by artificial intelligence and all the employment is taken by robots! After all, dedicated computers and robots get the job done a lot better than people, and a super-intelligent artificial intelligence could probably manipulate most of the population into subservience, anyway.

The challenge I've set myself with the Free Co-operative Zone is to produce an advanced civilisation in which the individual is still essential to the civilisation's survival, and artificial intelligence has failed to gain a foothold. At first I thought this probably wasn't feasible (without having to give the civilisation a debilitating or unrealistic technological disadvantage), but then I realised that The Invisible Hand described in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was like a distributed artificial intelligence in the way that it allocated resources, so I used this as the basis of my new civilisation. Though this is partly for personal reference, any comments are welcome!