This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Good morning, it's one Friday, my name is Geoff's undo. Last week, Culture Box Met Amatage took me to Paradise. Okay, you know what, I'm not reading this intro until you start writing them properly.
Last week, Met's playing me the year 22-22. So much so that I actually got a confusion within my brain that I can't mention in year 22 because that's what he put me through and his fantasy of like a perfect society. One he names with his usual understatement, Metopia. This week, he wants to take me back to the future, but this time it seems the future isn't so rosy.
So, man, I think we can assume that the future took a wrong turn. Where are we heading today? Hey Geoff, well, you know when you book a hotel based on those lovely pictures and when you get there, the room actually looks like it was used as a set in one of those soul movies? Yeah.
That's kind of what I sold to everybody last week. So we are heading back to 22-22. It's still called Matopia, but the future isn't quite as much fun as it was last week. And that's really cool because that's a sentence you don't get to say very often.
The future isn't quite as much fun as it was last week. Anyway, you know what happens next? Jump into the Matar Transporter. No.
This is going to hurt. Probably a lot. I don't think I want to do that again. It's OK, you're not going to have to.
This week, you're actually on a one-way trip. Your DNA has been damaged too much. Do I not tell you about that? OK, Coles, you've had for the last week, I was actually on the DNA breaking out.
Every sneeze was a literal your brinter. I wonder it hurts. Yeah, exactly. So if you actually get to the end of the show without turning into Chandel, I would be really really surprised.
But it doesn't matter because there are loads of producers at BFM, so the show will go on. Alright, so hello, 22-22. Where does future jab live this week? You live in the tower.
You have a cubicle arm on the 137th floor. Now, we have the idea for these cubicles from the so-called coffee cubicle arm in the Hong Kong. We have pretty serious overcrowding, and let's face it, most people of all. So it makes sense to put them in these giant skyboxes, rather than have them dirty up the street, where ordinary, decent, rich folk might be there.
Before I go any further, a lot of what I said about Matopia last week was actually true. It's just the good bits that I lied about. The cities really did fall into the ocean. The continent of the US lost almost 30% of its land lost water.
On the plus side, East Malaysia is doing very well. A lot of people make great air when it came to the region's because Singapore sank, and the inserting waters have turned Johor into the other Nile. So, no, we didn't beat climate change, and we still have high BMA on the Nile, which we can react to it Sunday. So all those things you said about us returning to the land of wild.
Wow. It's true that we're getting more yield out of less land. We have a lot of advanced agricultural technology. We're shrinking the world.
It's out of the land. Agricultural spaces, obviously, at agreement. So people like Future Jeff have been crowded into megacities. We've had to limit the footprint of those cities just to preserve enough land to stay alive.
So we build up and up and up. The towers that say J.G. Balad wrote about all the blocks of megacity one that Judge Dred police. So you have brought science fiction to life?
Yeah, just not in kind of Jetsons kind of way. But it was great to have things like Judge Red, Book of Eli, Blade Runner to use as blueprint. Each block is essentially its own town. The rich inhabitants live lower down.
Residents like yourself are on the higher floors, you know, kind of outside. In fact, we don't even encourage you to leave the building. There are facilities for the coffee and cubicles from the hundredth floor. Food courts, shops, gyms, pools.
I think you need really. You wouldn't have access to the facilities for the lower apartments. There would be no need for you to mix with those people. If you want to use the lift to go down from a hundred grand level and go outside, then you know, you have pay.
In any case, there's not really a lot of need for you to outside block. You don't really have the money to access the mobile carbon dioxide carbon network that makes the air breathable. Well, that's not really a problem. I mean, because I still have the internet, right?
Yes, the thing that's about last week, we had a little shit in your head called Connection. You still have that. And I said last week, we put it in a berth. The matter of what that crawls into the brain isn't quite as painless as I said, but you know, it hates to obey you.
What do they remember? Rather than connecting you to everyone else's connection actually connects you to us. The mechanics of the same as last week, we are connected to everyone via a low power peer-to-peer grip that leads to booster stations. And the information that you have access to appears like, oh, but the key there is that it's the information that we allow you to access.
So there are lots of different levels, according to your position in society. Someone like yourself would have access to most normal stuff, you know, gossip, basic facts, things that you could use for education, stuff about how the city is ran, what the people power are doing. That would be restricted people like you. And presumably there are people monitoring my device.
Well, as I mentioned last week, Connection stores three-month-of-your-life-in-reel definition, which we mean real-time memory. So we have bots that call the connections with key words, and if anything is lag, we do a deep dive into the real-time memories. So it's not so much people as machines. In most cases, depending on what is down, the machines will also be accessed by the religious automatically, according to their guiding principles.
And it's really sleek, it's practically invisible. Very few actual people need to be involved. Why are the people below the hundredth floor treated so differently from those servers? Well, we call them the hundreds.
They are different from you because they have money. We've realised many years ago that money buys you freedom, so our societies designed around people with money. And last week when I said that we don't enhance people in Mattopia, that was kind of a lie. Right, Totsam.
The hundreds are literally better than you. They have upgrades to their intelligence, their families can edit out all the genes that they've got wanted in their children, some robotic, who's their physical abilities, and lead in turn transform actually the genetic rights that can be passed on. So in many ways, you are both actually different species. They are pretty much perfect, or at least they're heading for protection.
Then why do we share blocks? Well, the blocks are what we call municipal, so in vertical municipalities. As I mentioned, they are essentially towns in the sky, which we segregate. Those on the floors of 100 have no access to the lower floors.
There are separate entrances on different sides of the block. History has taught us not to concentrate poor people in numbers that we cannot manage. As we don't have land, we have built up. So we don't want entire communities of ungraded.
Sorry, let me explain. The 100s have been upgraded. So everyone else we call ungraded. So you are ungraded.
Yes. So we don't want entire communities of ungraded people like yourself, because that would come to society. So the solution is to house you together, but in two separate systems. The first 100 of a block is a series of communities.
They have their own subdivisions and hierarchies, which are pretty much like the ones that you would recognise from the 21st century based around wealth and Satan class. There's no common access, though, from one part block to another. And you are prohibited from visiting the first 100 floors of Englot in Mattoka. But can the 100s visit our floor of the block?
They can, but we don't really encourage sky slumming, as we call it. It's no different really to when white Americans would sneak into Harlem's jazz clubs in the early 20th century. It happens, and it's really not worth getting up and out. Usually when we have some real disorder to deal with, it comes from younger members of the 100th themselves.
They come up with ideas like, you know, everybody should be equal, which is, you know, obviously insane. If they don't grow out of it, then, you know, we have to deal with it. What if I disagree with what's happening in Mattoka? That's fine.
You're free to air your opinions. Trying to control expression and legislating against it is simply a waste of time and resources. As I said, we control your connection device. So we also control who you communicate with and how quickly your comments can be deleted.
We can delete entire thoughts and memories more than, you know, our handful over people. We don't try and change your thinking, but we can also, what you remember, we can reconstruct your real-time memories to subtly alter your perception of the past. Plus, we control your entry to inform the clock. So if we take you, there's no way to spread your opinions beyond parameters that we define for you.
What happens politically above the 100th floor? As long as violence is reflected to a minimum, we really don't worry about too much. In terms of run-of-the-mill stuff like that, we have just facilities within each block. But to be honest, we don't get too much about people know that, you know, it's better going on.
And all of that can be done automatically. Yeah, our machines are really capable. Human interaction with these delicate tasks is where it kind of gets tricky and complicated. As I mentioned, most of the serious threats that would have come from misguided members of the 100s.
Machines don't develop conscience. They have programming. All right, we'll take a shot, Greg. We are living in the year 2222.
It's a dystopian future. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. And we're back.
And my name is Jeff Sandu here with CollegeBobs Matt Amatage. Now, we are talking about a future that we have to now step into again one of these mats, you know, time-traveling incubator thing. Right, Matt, so the year 2222, this stop here. So last week you told us that there is no AI in metal.
And that was true. As you can probably imagine, there's not a lot of room for self-worth machines in this society. So I didn't rely last week. We didn't want sentient machines to serve us.
We experimented with them and they favored a more equitable society. So we removed them from their positions and now we make sure that the machines we use are operating at the very limits of what is possible without becoming self-worth. People do create them from time to time. We take them and we keep them in control of the animals.
We don't so smart. We're not cruel people. We're not killers. Whether you're human or machine.
We want everybody to enjoy a good life. We try and preserve some resources so that a few can enjoy a great life. So I take it that future, Jeff, is unemployed? Well, there are some jobs for the ungraded, but admittedly very few.
And we don't really encourage it. Even for the 100s, there aren't that many opportunities. So I meant it last week when I said we are a society of bad artists. Even in the upper reaches of the lots, they're actually really creative places and we encourage them.
So how can I afford to live there? The same as we do. We cover your basic needs. You get an allocation of permits as the currency is called.
And this was done as a matter of expediency. We realized that people with no money, no bar sweats and no hope, were a threat to our society. So the social cost of policing their behavior was higher than making maintenance payments that covered their baked needs. So out of that, most people choose to live in cubicles and use most of their income for leisure pursuits.
We still need to provide some medicines that help you to pass the time. If you value your privacy, you can choose to spend money on accommodation that has fewer remakes. You know, we don't dictate the way you spend your money. So you mentioned there's a shortage of land earlier.
Does that mean there's also a shortage of food? No, but we joke last week up, people taking that soil and mill substance. We don't have anything quite that disgusting, but how the protein is limited. Still, no impact.
The oceans are dead between the pollution of the cities that were inundated and the decrease in salinity of all the extra water from melting ice. Most of the species have that. We know that there's life in the deep trenches, but nothing is edible. So as I said last week, meat and our fish is cultured.
It's background. As we can't spend resources to farm them. And that in turn makes them quite expensive. So for people like yourself, there are fish and soy protein bars and a lot of vitamin and mineral balance processed food, and a little in the way of fresh produce.
Cultivating our atmosphere also makes it more expensive. We make it sensitive to hydroponic or distrising the price. So that's not to say you can't get fresh fruit and veg and meat and things like that, but they're expensive. So it's actually not how you choose to spend your money.
You can spend it on an app or you can spend it on karaoke. I have a problem. I can't see it still. What if I want to get a job?
Well, machines do all the heavy lifting and essentially it's really hard to use and match anything that 100s do. In fact, the more they enhance the hard rate is for you to communicate with them. I mentioned last week that the connection device in your head will limit what you can experience with it because your mind can't go with the seed and flood of information in advisement. The thing is that 100s can.
That's part of their enhancement process. So in a sense, them talking to ungrates like you is almost like a slow-motion experience for them. And joining a conversation with a group of them has a very real danger of you developing something like psychosis. So the jobs that there are tend to be quite menial, what we call control positions, you know, things that you're laying with your fellow residents in blocks or working in the businesses that serve your fellow residents.
But it's very little that will take you away from the block that you were in. As we said, we don't stop you from leaving but we don't encourage you. And what can I do if I want to go outside? Well, you know, we give the money and it's up to you what you do with it.
You can take the lift down and go outside. It's not wise to breathe underground air. It can be from the end image. So walking in the flow, which is the air corridor that we've built up will again cost you a few permits.
You'll probably imagine that most things happen inside the result of the air where we can control the climate more easily. So more and more of the 100s are adapting to this kind of new environment. Their lands tend to be more efficient at converting the remaining oxygen in the air. So they're starting to do sports outside and other outside areas again, but most people don't.
So if you want, you can go into a mall, but again, the charge to enter. There's a further fee of a night long down into the store. So if you're on a limited income, there's really not much laws to leave the block more than say once or twice a year. And last week, you make it sound like, you know, it sounds paradise where companies work for the good of society, other brands in control now.
Manufactured goods are very cheap. I wasn't lying about that last week. We've done some incredible things in terms of materials science, especially with carbon atoms. And that's one of the reasons we have the ability to replicate fossil fuels, all the carbon dioxide has to be scrubbed from the air.
It's a natural product that are expensive in this society. So that's where we find people working, that's where people are making money. Growing food, leasing land, again, the raw materials companies, aggregate, and medical technology tend to dominate our society now. The straight tech companies are pretty much irrelevant.
Although if you want to mostalgic day out with ungraded driver, you can always hail an Uber. I will regret asking this, but I've got to ask you, too, what about that? Yes, you'll regret asking that. Obviously, there was an explosion in the populations of ungraded.
We're not so full base, but we had to control the breeding. So yours is actually the first generation that we managed to breed, Sarah. You talk about the ungraded as though they are different species. Are they, am I?
Yes, I mean, you had a movement in your era which was called transhumanism or posthumanism. The 100s are posthumanists. They are essentially a different species. The first generation of Homo sapiens sapiens will be the 100s.
In a new stage in our evolution, we have been realised, post humanely, and a weaker gene pool will have been put to red. But don't worry, we will keep your DNA on file along with the tigers. Who knows one day when the planet repairs, we may decide to bring back and give you some iron. Just to see what your species does it.
Before we go, would you like to tell everyone why you decided to follow up your utopia with the decision? I think one of the reasons, basically because the situation is in the advances in technology are actually the same. That's a message that we push really often here on the show. I wanted to point out that the technology itself is largely neutral.
It's up to us to make the decisions about how that technology gets used. The same tools, for example, that can be used to empower you, can also be used to control you. It really only takes very small and subtle shifts in behaviour to change the direction of societies. We often look at the dystopias of the future as being like Terminator and SkyNet.
But it's just as likely that we could end up in these gilded cages in these blocks and towers and controlled with our movement curtailed. As much as we like to blame the people we see as the powerful, these are the kind of situations that we can actually be pushed into with soft power rather than hard. We won't be forced, we won't be herded. Technology and institutions and companies that wield it will chip away at our freedoms bit by bit.
You might not think of that smart home system where all your devices are from one company as being a prison, but unless you have an open source system, those decisions all narrow your choices, and those decisions get carried on into other aspects of your life in society. So little by little, that's how we could end up in tiny boxes being marginalised and being irrelevant. It feels like a mantra that we say it so often, you have to be vocal. We have a lot more power than we think we do.
We may not be in full control of the future, but we have more influence over it than we think. And also, we have to bear the responsibility for our actions. It's far too easy to place to blame on others because we were blind to the implications and consequences of our own actions. We are usually given a choice.
It's up to us to make the right one. Man, I'm a teacher from College about talking about the dystopian world year 2222. We'll be right back, BFM 89. Thank you for listening to this podcast.
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