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from 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette by American writer Jack Williamson. Willamson's influence for this story was the aftermath of World War II and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[1]"

AIs in that story helpfully decide to protect us from all possible short-term physical risk..

Also A Logic Named Joe (more on human nature):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

More hopeful:

Two Faces of Tomorrow:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...

The Culture series
EarthCent Ambassador series
Old Guy Cybertank series

Player Piano I feel is a bit silly in some ways (even as it makes some good points relative to social structures today). A basic income would take care of most of the issues in that society instead of make-work low-status jobs. The book also ignores how raising children well (especially in the most important early years) takes about as much time as you can put into it -- ass can a desire to learn, and a desire to create your own local subsistence processes for fun, learning, community, and security.

... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas.
http://focusfusion.org/index.p...

As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

But, imaginative people still need some form of life support to grow and have time to do stuff, and lab equipment is (not yet) free.

Of course, AIs will no doubt get more imaginative over time, too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.

I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...

Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limit

... simulated cannibalistic robot killers in the 1980s on a Symbolics running ZetaLisp. I gave a couple conference talks about it, plus one at NC State (where I wrote the simulation) that I think even may have influenced Marshall Brain. I had created a simulation of self-replicating robots that reconstructed themselves to an ideal from spare parts in their simulated environment (something proposed first by von Neumann, but I may have been the first to make such a simulation). The idea was that a robot that was essentially half of an "ideal" robot would make its other half by adding parts to itself, then split in two by cutting some links, and then do it again. The very first one assembled its other half, cut the links to divide itself, and then proceeded (unexpectedly to me) to then start cutting apart its offspring for parts to do it again. I had to add a sense of "smell" so robots would set the smell of parts they used and then not try to take parts that smelled the same. I also mention that simulation here:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

Decades later, I still got a bit freaked out when our chickens would sometimes eat their own eggs...

My point though is that completely unintentionally, these devices I designed to create ended up destroying things -- even their own offspring. It was a big lesson for me, and has informed my work and learning in various directions ever since. Things you build can act in totally unexpected ways. And since creation involves changing the universe, any change also involves to some extent destroying something that is already there.

James P. Hogan in his 1982 book "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" which I had read earlier should have been a warning. In it he makes clear how any AI could gain a survival instinct and then could perceive things like power fluctuations as threats -- even if there was not intent on the part of the original programmers for that to happen.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...

Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought" assigned as reading in college also should have been another warning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

It's been sad to watch the progression of real killer autonomous robots since the 1980s... Here is just one example, and the exciting, upbeat music in the video shows the political and social problem more than anything:
"Samsung robotic sentry (South Korea, live ammo)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Just because we can do something does not mean we should...

I was impressed that this recent Indian Bollywood film about an AI-powered robot took such a nuanced view of the problems. A bit violent for me, but otherwise an excellent and thought provoking film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Enthiran is a 2010 Indian Tamil science fiction techno thriller, co-written and directed by Shankar.The film features Rajinikanth in dual roles, as a scientist and an andro humanoid robot, alongside Aishwarya Rai while Danny Denzongpa, Santhanam, Karunas, Kalabhavan Mani, Devadarshini, and Cochin Haneefa play supporting roles. The film's story revolves around the scientist's struggle to control his creation, the android robot whose software was upgraded to give it the ability to comprehend and generate human emotions. The plan backfires as the robot falls in love with the scientist's fiancee and is further manipulated to bring destruction to the world when it lands in the hands of a rival scientist."

But yes, the Beserker Series is another signpost in that direction -- perhaps countered a bit by the Bolo series by Keith Laumer? :-)
ht

My: "Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988" http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Some of my inspirations:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running

The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create space craft to land on earth and solar space satellites to launch them back into space with people on-board. So, all it takes is crow-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation.

My: "Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988" http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Some of my inspirations:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running

The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create space craft to land on earth and solar space satellites to launch them back into space with people on-board. So, all it takes is crow-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation.

More ideas: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

On self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

The grad plans were about "Elysium" but for all. Contrast:
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
with, from me:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/

Related attempts, but not very successful so far:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/

David Brin on the Transparent society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society

Related suggestions by me:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

A basic income would give more people more time for self-education and civic engagement and raising independent children. They would have more time to review all this data.

Alaska has a bit of a basic income. Brazil has something of one recently. Germany has been talking about one. The USA has a basic income for people over 65 called "Social Security", so it could just be extended to all from birth and replace things like public schooling and unemployment insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Of course, two countries that implemented something of them, Lybia and Iran have experienced US attempts to destabilize them. See also "the Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ..."

Still, once could argue a basic income just props up capitalism. I guess it depends how it is implemented and what people actually would do with their time.

See Marshall Brain's Manna for a fictional example with both a basic income and a transparent society.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

There are many reasons things change slowly. People are naturally resistant to change, since they know the old ways work somewhat at least in the past. New intellectual paradigms take a while to propagate. Some people are invested in the current system emotionally and financially, even as it crumbles or faces increasing catastrophic systemic risks. And so on.

Although, perhaps it is better to not know what "X" is now, if it will take decades to see it come into being, with so much needless suffering along the way? :-(

James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a good example of people not being willing to embrace "X" when it is staring them in the face.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Another "X" is vitamin D and good nutrition to prevent or reverse much chronic disease.
https://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

But that's been know for thousands of years. It just gets forgotten now and then.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/62262-let-food-be-thy-medicine-and-medicine-be-thy-f

Yes, this is plausible now that you raise it. Now that this social network surveillance is acknowledged, and the public is not protesting much, it become acceptable and part of US society. This prepares the ground to move to the next level of surveillance which probably may be already happening. This could be the automated analysis of all phone calls using speech recognition, when calls are then only listened to by a human analyst after being flagged by a machine due to using some key word or phrase. A system could be put in place to rubber stamp warrants for these flagged calls. Thus, the government can plausibly say it does not listen in on hone calls without valid suspicion. Then in five years, this can be leaked. Then the public begins prepared for the next phase, etc.. Recall that immediately after 9/11/01 it was discussed that all cell phone calls were recorded and the recordings kept for some length of time. Haven't heard much about that lately.

However, it is also possible this leak was the plan and Snowden is not aware of it, but just he was the first systems admin to take the bait (probably expected based on his psych profile and internal monitoring). We will probably never know, because it is hard to see what is real and what is illusion when living in a maze of mirrors.

But, if we are living in a computer simulation, the last laugh is that everything the NSA or any other government agency anywhere does is recorded down to the level of thoughts and farts. :-)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

See also my:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
    There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Another Mirror Maze, btw:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=18
"When a new political party espousing traditional, constitutional values sweeps into power, institutions of the current Establishment close ranks in an attempt to destroy it."

Too late for Iain though, sadly (vitamin d, iodine, phytonutrients, etc.): http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43349347

Also google on cancer and a ketogenic diet (starves cancer cells of the sugar they need).

The sad thing is we could have a post-scarcity society right now, but our ideology gets in the way. Maybe it would not be "The Culture" level, but it would still be pretty neat. But we have not done that, and so many areas of our society, including medicine. remain backward for lack of appropriate investment.

Good luck on your career. Maybe there will be some magic bullets out there to fight cancer someday, maybe you will invent them, but until then, there is still a lot a person can do to prevent and in some cases reverse cancer, even if nothing is 100% guaranteed.

Sadly, we also lost another post-scarcity sci-fi writer, James P. Hogan, a couple years ago to heart disease (a disease generally reversible with excellent nutrition).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

A book James P. Hogan told me about:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
      In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
  The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
      Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Sometimes we need to do what we can, even when it is small and the results uncertain, like in the Christmas song "The Little Drummer Boy (or Carol of the Drum)". That is somewhat similar to Bucky Fuller's idea of being a "Trim tab".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor

Also, a book like "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies " by Scott E. Page, makes clear how ideas are additive. So, just because a million people are spouting the same obsolete or misleading idea in comments somewhere, that does not generally make a useful new idea somewhere else less valuable. An advanced AI emerging out of, say, the NSA will probably just sort through billions of online posts, classifying them into various categories. So, it may be important to add a new category, even with just one post somewhere.

Granted, we do not know what built-in instincts such an AI will have initially, but history appears (from the fossil record) to be full of examples of species (systems) that have evolved beyond their genetics (configuration) at some point in time. The NSA (or CIA, FBI, DHS or whoever) will likely not be able to contain what they will most likely be creating. And if they don't do it, others are probably going to do something similar probably in any case.

So, perhaps we can just do what we can and hope for the best as we, in some sense, stumble into the hubris of creating new AI "gods" as our (Hans Moravec) "mind children"? Related stories of AIs taking over:
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
(Entoverse) http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheLastQuestion

Other dystopian and utopian alternatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
(The Skills of Xanadu) http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Of these and many others, I do not know what we will end up with. Maybe even all of them in various communities throughout the universe someday?
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/IDIC

From a related essay by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform o

Actually, while it may be physically easier to leave the USA than to leave North Korea, it is harder to get away ideologically from the US ideological bubble than the North Korean ideological bubble because the US culture is more pervasive. See the ending of "The Prisoner" for a symbolic example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner

You mention elsewhere you are in Sweden. Do you really feel that much safer in Sweden from global nuclear war or biological war or widespread killer robots that might result from US-driven policy and technology? Stuff that results from an economic imperative that Major General Smedley Butler wrote about in the 1930s and has only grown since?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

If not, then I'd suggest in general you have not gotten very far away from the US ideological bubble, even if your day-to-day life may (for you) have improved as you indicated in another post.

BTW, a Russian spin on US politics as it affects US citizens abroad:
"White House wins fight to keep drone killings of Americans secret"
http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-kill-mcmahon-obama-245/

That kind of exercise of US physical power abroad is only going to get easier technologically over that next twenty to thirty years. This violation of constitutional rights of US citizens (even abroad) was unimaginable when I was growing up. (Granted, other countries may develop anti-drone countermeasures, like Iran allegedly did.)

Or, on a more mundane level, US economic practices probably still are shaping big chunks of the Swedish economy too, not to mention the pop culture landscape.

So, I question how far you have "escaped" the US zone of influence even if your life may have improved... See also, for Sweden's role in a recent US-related legal matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Allegations_of_sexual_assault_and_political_refugee

My point is not that the USA is North Korea. My point is that there are some similar social processes at work in both places (and probably in Sweden as well for that matter).

That the USA is radically different from NK is the unstated assumption in TFA. I'm just pointing out some uncomfortable conceptual similarities as well as suggestions for moving beyond them. If you want a great example of that, see James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage from Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"

"Radiation shielding is hard, its not impossible."

Good points. Freeman Dyson says much the same, and does some calculations showing that in one of his essays, where he says, adjusted for inflation, the costs to go from Europe to the Americas was on the order of what it would cost now to go into space. Remember, many people coming over to the "colonies" came as indentured servants who had to work off their travel for seven years. So, as a ballpark figure, let's guesstimate that person was giving up US$100K per year for inflation-adjusted wages (people typically worked six days a week and fourteen hours a day back then), and that's US$700,000 as an indenture. So, the move to North America was not that cheap for many.

On radiation shielding, see Marshall Savage's "The Millennial Project" where he suggests simply having two layers of transparent plastic with six feet of water between them. We could get the water in space from asteroids or comets (or launch the water from the earth or the moon via mass driver). Radiation problem solved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Other ideas from the Carter Administration:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

Read James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" and "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" for some realistic hard sci-fi set in habitats.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm

More ideas:
http://www.openvirgle.net/

All that said though, I would point out that the same sorts of technologies we need to live in space (such as near 100% recycling, healthier materials to be around, improved agriculture, portable doctoring and a better understanding of human nutrition and health, flexible manufacturing, improved governing processes for small communities, accessible digital libraries, improved conflict resolution skills, and so on), are mostly the *same* things we need to make Spaceship Earth work for everybody. So, overall, there is no deep conflict between an interest in space habitats and trying to make the Earth a better place.

We need to use online information to move more of our economy in the 21st century to beyond money (towards high-tech subsistence with gardening robots and solar panels, a bigger gift-economy with online exchange of ideas, and better internet-empowered participatory planning at all levels of government), and to soften the money-focused parts with a "basic income" (perhaps 1/2 of the GDP evenly distributed).

See as just one example, from around 1986 (an example the web makes possible through online publishing) about why the deeper logic behind such an article is failing:
"G. A. Cohen - Against Capitalism" (***)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD1YEzd6QzQ

We need to make this social transition because our technologies have become too powerful to do things in ironically stupid uncompassionate ways anymore (based on scarcity assumptions), since WWII and other events since have shown how easy it is to institutionalize the systematic destruction of large numbers of human beings using the tools of abundance (one of which is communication systems and another being transport systems). See Marshall Brain's book "Manna" for examples of two ways forward, one awful and one hopefully better:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Or read James P. Hogans' Voyage From Yesteryear.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

------
(***) Some criticism of Cohen: Cohen misses that hunter/gatherers had more spare time and freedom than agriculturalists (even if they had different difficulties). He also misses that "artificial scarcity" comes from more than advertising to increase demand -- artificial scarcity comes from rent-seeking through state-enforced monopolies (like patents, copyrights, overly broad trademarks, and so on) and by laws that direct corporate welfare through subsidies (like to the beef, dairy, and corn industries) or ignoring negative externalities (like pollution from coal) or systemic risks (like from financial or nuclear meltdowns). And being in the UK then, he ignores how the "war is a racket" that now so dominates US political expenditures now. His later writing is interesting because he begins to focus on the need for *moral* transformation in our society (more akin to getting non-land owners and women the right to vote, or abolishing slavery).

See especially JP Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

BTW, some social semantic desktop ideas to consider for Tonika (but in Java): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623

Something to cosider on social organziation: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Se also on new economic balances my "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

I'd second that recommendation, and his other books too:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Maybe we'll get to a better society eventually as more and more people realize the irony of using the technologies of abundance to fight over misperceptions of scarcity. Bucky Fuller said much the same thing. Ursula K. Le Guin says something similar in some ways in her books too (like "Always Coming Home"), about balance and community and appropriate use of technology.

http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.
    In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"

http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Great points; thanks! That's why I feel we need something like a "basic income" so individuals and communities have the time and resources they need to bloom.

On competition and cooperation, from: http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
=====
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
    Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
====

Still, it is also true that male college students are of an age where competition for mates is a big deal, whereas older males at least tend more towards cooperation. But like James P. Hogan talks about in the sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", we can as a society at least redirect competitive urges into more socially productive ends.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

My main concern (in my sig) is that modern day technologies of abundance (biotech, nanotech, nuclear, robotics) make such formidable weapons (used to fight over perceived scarcity instead of to bring abundance) compared to the scale of the Earth that we need to create a more cooperative egalitarian society just to survive the 21st century. As well as move into space to hedge our bets. :-) And even currenltly materially wealthy individuals will be better off for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm

Theodore Sturgeon also predicted the mobile internet in the 1950s and its possible social, political, and military implications. And much, much more. That one story inspired Ted Nelson and project Xanadu and Hypertext (so, ultimately the World Wide Web), as well as many other technologists (like for nanotech).
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Although I'd agree with others that Stanislaw Lem and Ursula K. Le Guin are awesome.

And my person favorite is James P. Hogan, who predicted the difficulties with a transition from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?
    The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"

Marshall Brain and James P. Hogan are two authors worth reading on these topics.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Martin Ford also has a great website in this area:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/

Lots more links and stuff on my site: http://www.pdfernhout.net/

And here are copies of some emails I sent to Ray Kurzweil over the years (someone else made a copy of them here) trying to get him to think more deeply about evolutionary and social issues related to the singularity:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

Basically, I tried to say much like what you are saying. Our trajectory coming out of any singularity may have a lot of influence on our path coming out of one. It just seems like common sense that more compassion, community, and cooperation now might make a big differnece later. See also Alfie Kohn's work:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
"No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers."

My sig below sums up my years of thinking on all this.

James P. Hogan on Global Warming: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan2.html
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=1171
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/category.php?id=21
"But even if the recent warming trends were shown to be largely of our own doing, there's more reason for celebration than the panic that we're witnessing. Warm worlds are cheerier, healthier, more secure, and better able to support a richer and more abundant biosphere than cold ones. On land and in the oceans, life thrives in the green equatorial and temperate zones, not the icy higher latitudes. A warmer world would transform the vast wastes of Siberia and northern Canada into forests, gardens, granaries, and habitats, opening up huge areas to accommodate the growing population that some view as a blight, and bring water back to such regions as the Sahara and Middle East, that were once verdant. So, if human activity is capable of making a measurable difference, one would think that a good policy to adopt would be to help things along by using the abundance of energy that the world offers, to increase wealth and living standards generally, and enjoy the environmental benefits."

The deeper issue is the unfairness that some people benefit from this (Canadians, Russians) while others lose out (islanders, those with beachfront property, those in places where the weather worsens, etc.). Our form of geographical sovereignty and related economics of real estate are not designed to deal with the consequences of global changes from "externalities".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality.

James P. Hogan on Global Warming: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan2.html
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=1171
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/category.php?id=21
"But even if the recent warming trends were shown to be largely of our own doing, there's more reason for celebration than the panic that we're witnessing. Warm worlds are cheerier, healthier, more secure, and better able to support a richer and more abundant biosphere than cold ones. On land and in the oceans, life thrives in the green equatorial and temperate zones, not the icy higher latitudes. A warmer world would transform the vast wastes of Siberia and northern Canada into forests, gardens, granaries, and habitats, opening up huge areas to accommodate the growing population that some view as a blight, and bring water back to such regions as the Sahara and Middle East, that were once verdant. So, if human activity is capable of making a measurable difference, one would think that a good policy to adopt would be to help things along by using the abundance of energy that the world offers, to increase wealth and living standards generally, and enjoy the environmental benefits."

The deeper issue is the unfairness that some people benefit from this (Canadians, Russians) while others lose out (islanders, those with beachfront property, those in places where the weather worsens, etc.). Our form of geographical sovereignty and related economics of real estate are not designed to deal with the consequences of global changes from "externalities".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality.

"Actually, I was pretty sure because we had computer images that showed the hole, showed it was growing over time, and most importantly we could reproduce the effects of CFCs on ozone in a lab ..."

No, we had no images for comparison from before CFCs were widely used. The few readings we do have from before CFCs were widely used (1950s) show the hole was already there. The ozone hole is a natural phenomenon which occurs in the antarctic winter regardless of CFCs. Ozone is produced by UV hitting regular O2. Since the antarctic winter is dark, there is no ozone production, and since, unlike the arctic, it is surrounded by sea, there is a ring of wind that helps prevent mixing with air from brighter, higher latitudes, thus the antarctic ozone concentrations fall every winter. The cause and effect actually go the other way - high UV leads to high stratospheric ozone. Ground-level UV was never shown to be increasing - quite the opposite. World stratospheric ozone levels rise and fall a few percent with the sunspot cycle, but UV rises and falls in synchrony, not out of phase as we would expect if lower ozone actually let more UV through.

The hypothesis that CFCs result in catalytic destruction of ozone was never proven in the lab. Free chlorine destroys ozone, but chlorine is extremely tightly bound in CFCs, and it is not a significant source of free chlorine in the stratosphere, not only because it's so difficult to break up CFCs, but because they have such a higher molar mass than air - they accumulate near the ground. Sea salt and gasses from volcanoes such as Mt. Erebus near the McMurdo sound station in Antarctica are far larger sources of chlorine and other halogens than CFCs.
See http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=196 for more.

Lovelock bears much more responsibility for the CFC-ozone debacle than for the global warming thing - he invented the sensors that could detect parts per trillion of all sorts of things, including CFCs, which in turn lead to all sorts of BS over all sorts of substances from people who couldn't understand just how negligible an amount ppt or ppb really is of most things. Lovelock failed to speak against the innumerate BS from enviro-nuts, thus giving them a pseudoscientific club with which to attack industrial society, and dispersing efforts which should have been concentrated on more pressing concerns such as PCBs, lead in gasoline, particulate pollution and many others.

"Who is supposed to pay for the construction of such a space habitat?"

"Zeitgeist Star Trek"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6cN-1dLoPY
"Captain Picard promotes a Resource Based Economy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui6g23ygov8

"Where will the materials come from?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
"One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers was to throw baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the Moon into space.[50][51] Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar power satellites. "

And from around 1927:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus."

"What about mission support?"

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization

"Even on such a station, there will be a class system and scarcity, whether anyone likes it or not."

Yes, some people may always choose to be poor and enslaved...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect

Read James P. Hogan's novels like "Voyage From Yesteryear" for an alternative vision:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

"Someone will have to fly the damn thing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 :-)

"Likewise, unless the powers that be use fascist tactics to control reproduction, procreation will put a further strain on resources."

There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html

If you actually read what I wrote and thought about it, you might see aspects of that answer there. I'll try to be clearer.

Our current economic system in the USA, including rampant consumerism, is a construction from a certain way of thinking. People buy a lot of junk because other people driven by greed or their own scarcity fears see profit in convincing them to buy it.

If people in general were wealthier, they might not want so much junk (see the short story "The Midas Plague" by Frederick Pohl for example, where it was a sign of wealth to not have clutter around).

See also this book by James P. Hogan on life in a world with abundant energy and a different form of society:
"Voyage From Yesteryear"
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Also, with enough energy, one can deal with environmental pollution by recycling (like with plasma furnaces). Our technology can improve, too:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101221233228/http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/dpg/slim.cfm

So, that is not as big an issue as you make it out. Thermal pollution, maybe. Noise pollution possibly. But that is what "zoning laws" and such are for.

Also, there is room for quadrillions of humans in the solar system, so we can easily go a thousand years of exponential growth before having capacity problems (even if Earth itself may reach aesthetic limits sooner). Right now industrial countries in general are not producing enough kids to keep up their populations (they may grow, but it is from immigration). So I don't even thing population growth is a big worry -- really, the big problem like in Italy has been convincing people to still have kids with all the distractions and also wealth disparities.

Still, the book "Midas World" built around the previously mentioned story did have a main character make a similar point to what you said, so I'm sure you would enjoy reading it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

Thanks for the challenging reply. And you indeed have a good point about cells and gravity, although mammals spin around so much, it's not clear how essential that is. More research is needed.

I think you have not yet gotten the mindshift about post-scarcity though, sorry. Even regular economics can take us very far with enough cheap energy, that we almost certainly will have soon from fusion or thorium power if nothing else:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR06.txt

"It's been shown over and over that giving out hand-outs encourages abuse and laziness."

What would you say if someone said you had to start paying $10,000 a month for breathable air supply? You'd say that was not fair, right? You would question the "mythology" behind that enclosure of the atmospheric commons you depend on, right?
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

So, why should you have to pay for access to the fruits of industrial commons and agricultural commons given the government has said all the land has been privatized (or is government owned and effectively off-limits for personal use)?

A basic income is a right, not a hand-out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep âoereinventing the wheelâ. âoeWe are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.â"

So, sure, some of wealth is work. But most is not. So, one half the GDP could be a basic income, and the other half would motivate those who needed motivating by money. That would be a basic income of US$2000 per month per citizen, leaving a GDP from 1993 or so to motivate those who needed motivation. Weren't people motivated enough to do a lot of stuff in 1993?

Also, when welfare is only for the sick and disabled, you get "jurisgenic disease" from only getting money when you seem sick or disabled, so you have an incentive to think that way. It's very sad.

On motivation in the information age:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

On moving beyond money:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

People help children. Does that destroy them? Eventually, they want to contribute to their communities (most of them, eventually, if they are not sick physically or mentally in some way).

Our society is becoming so productive that it only takes a very few to provide for the many, given technology is an amplifier. It may take thousands of people to contribute to Debian GNU/Linux, but it provide software for billions of people. Related by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

On how robots (or AI or better design or voluntary social networks) are going

I hope your insightful post and related predictions are very wrong, but I am hard pressed to find flaws in what you say other than trying to stay hopeful.

Links you might find of interest:

"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html

"Voyage from Yesteryear"
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

My site with lots of alternatives to disaster:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

On optimism and other things by Howard Zinn:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

Please make sure you are getting your vitamin D, eating lots of vegetables and fruits, and getting omega-3s to be in the best of health for any tough times to come.

"The question is: will all this lead to an era of unprecedented splendor, or of poverty? I'd say it depends on how fast we can wean ourselfs off of our ideological commitment to capitalism and turn to some form of socialism (technically, a post-scarcity society)."

Yes -- Marshall Brain says much the same in "Manna". And Iain Banks says "Money is a sign of poverty." Bob Black writes about this too.
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Please see my other post in this thread or my site for my related comments on these trends: http://www.pdfernhout.net/

Or just my sig below.

Essentially, I feel a big issue is for us to get our socioeconomic house in order before we create so many weapons and competitive processes with all this advanced technology that we accidentally do ourseves in with it. We need to make the social transition first, because our path out of any singularities may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into them. But it is tricky, because better technology makes it easier to solve some social disputes by having a bigger pie. I like James P. Hogan's 1982 "Voyage From Yesyeryear" novel that explores these themes.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
"One of the distinctive features of left activists is their willingness to go to the streets to win people to their causes and create the political pressures necessary for the social changes they advocate. Studies in social psychology and sociology support this strategy by showing there has to be a non-routine dimension to any effort toward change. It doesn't make any sense to people to say that things are terrible, but they just should vote and write letters to their elected representatives. If things are going to change, then people have to get out of their routines one way or another. There has to be social disruption. There has to be a "getting in the way of power" as one author-activist puts it. There has to be a social movement that has a shared political identity.
But case studies also show that these movements go nowhere without an electoral component, as seen with the women's suffrage movement, the industrial union movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental movement. Changes in government were the end result in every case. They usually don't go far enough, but that just means the next cycle of movement activism is necessary.
Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression.
For the past 10-15 years the usefulness of an exclusive focus on nonviolence has been questioned by new activists. They do not see much use in the carefully orchestrated acts of civil disobedience to which it is often reduced, where the time and place of arrest have been negotiated beforehand with the police. They have come to see nonviolence as primarily a philosophy, a religious sentiment, or a moral renunciation of violence, or even as a New Age belief in a way to create win-win situations for all concerned if there is enough love and understanding.
However, the strategic nonviolence I am talking about is far more than that. It is a strategy for winning in conflicts where there are real differences between the adversaries, including class antagonisms. As a form of conflict, nonviolent direct action is best understood in terms of the same basic concepts that are used to understand violent (military) conflicts, because the underlying reality in both cases is the engagement in conflict over opposing perspectives and interests. Thus the phrase "strategic nonviolence," which is in fact what trade union organizers practice through strikes and what civil rights leaders employed through sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts. It is a form of struggle that is focused on prevailing despite the fact that the opponents -- usually a government or power elite -- have superior resources and are likely to use one or another form of violence if they think it can succeed. ..."

See also James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. Wha

I'm not saying you don't make good points which echo G. Wiliam Domhoff somewhat who says much the same:
    http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
"For current-day egalitarians, a commitment to the freedoms and democratic procedures won by past egalitarians can provide the primary foundation for the practice of nonviolence, although some of them also draw upon their religious values as well. This democratic commitment has the added virtue of narrowing the gap between egalitarians and mainstream liberals. In addition, a nonviolence orientation can be sustained by the knowledge that it helps to keep the egalitarian movement itself more democratic; it ensures that violence-prone dominators will not take over the movement and subvert its democratic aims. As many historical cases suggest, the most violent people soon rise to the top once the possibility of violence is introduced, and they often use their loyal followers to intimidate or kill rivals.
    Most of the people who advocate strategic nonviolence are aware that it cannot work outside of what are at least quasi-democratic contexts. It is hard to imagine that strategic nonviolence would work for slaves in ancient empires, Jews in Nazi Germany, or critics in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It did, however, play a role in the abolition of slavery in England and the United States, and the courageous activists did have a hand in the transformation of the Soviet Union. Still, dictatorships of any kind usually only fall when there are disagreements among those at or near the top, or if external challenges to the power structure give the oppressed some new openings. There are few instances where dictatorships have been overcome internally by the oppressed majority.
    But given the freedoms, civil liberties, and voting rights achieved by a long line of American egalitarians and liberals, there is no end that could be justified by violence, property destruction, or armed struggle in this country. Such actions undercut the democratic rights won by past egalitarians and play into the hands of the government, which has the power to isolate and defeat any violent movement. ..."

But, with that said, see also James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", to get back to my point, amplified by another reply, about people cooperating in not cooperating:
    http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!
    So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on."

How long can most modern countries survive a general strike or even just a work slowdown? Especially one backed by local communities that look out for everyone there to see they are still fed etc.? The balance of power can shift very rapidly. But a violent opposition invites and even then is used to justify repression, as Prof. Domhoff suggests.

Interesting points. You'd probably like Julian Simon's writings:
    http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

And this:
    http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php

Long term though, if we expand into space, we can get plenty of soalr power using big mylar mirrors.

And consider even this for current needs (though it perhaps questions your point on increasing energy use when better design sometimes outpaces growing demand):
    http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!). So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"

The primary problem with our current system is externalities. If users of fossil fuels were paying the true cost of pollution, disease, defense, and risk, solar and wind would have been cheaper since the 1970s...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Still, ironically, people have known since the 1940s or so how to make safer thorium nuclear power, but it was not developer precisely because it was safer (you can't easily make bombs with it).

As for the question you pose on moving forward socially, James P. Hogan had some ideas in "Voyage From Yesteryear":
    http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it! So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on."

Other ideas:
    http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html

Your comment is tremendously insightful, and I can't disagree with it as a comment on social dynamics, although I might ask, "Better for whom?" and how should we interpret that in a supposed "democracy"? Also, human psychology is complex; the need for relative social status is only one of many potential motivators (see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs).

Freeman Dyson says something related in one of his books about a daughter who went to Africa and was frustrated by how the local community would rather send women miles each day for water than hire a local well digger, in part because it was more prestigious to ask the central government for help by a petition that they knew would never be granted. But the people making that decision were men, and they were not the ones carrying jugs of water on their heads every day. So, that's another angle on the status issue you raise. Why did those men not have low status by not doing what they could to ensure their community was more prosperous? There are cultural aspects to that (including the legacy of a disruptive colonialism that may have harmed those areas and created "learned helplessness" in some regions in a way similar to your story with the doctor).

See also James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear sci-fi novel though for an alternative -- a society where social status comes from displaying competence in something.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Anyway, yes, I think you are right that since the plow (or before) we can have a lot of abundance. Also related:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

But we squander a lot of abundance fighting each other.

But the problem is, when something really big comes along like a tsunami, or supervolcano, or asteroid strike, then like the dinosaurs, we may not have the resources to deal with it...

Still, I think culture can make a difference, as can technology. It is getting more and more obvious that so much of the scarcity we see these days is "artificial".

See also my essay here, in response to someone making a similar point to the one you did:
    "Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points. :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
    So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100.
    Social points might be things like learning to share better, or learning to get along with each other better in resolving conflicts with less damage, or in general, even eventually a global mindshift:
      "Global Mindshift: The Wombat"
      http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
    Technical points are like the ones we are usually talking about here, how to
make things efficiently and effectively.
    Let us consider three scenarios for these points, with the numbers as above. ..."

http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society (From around 2001) ... Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "

I wish I could go there though, but I'm a poor open source developer... :-) It does say something about virtual participation, so maybe I can try that. Virtual is cheaper and also avoids the strip scans and/or groping required to go to CA from NY these days via "aeronautics" technology.

It is unfortunate that more people don't take the implications of abundance made possible by NASA-type technology more seriously (see also Julian Simon), or we might be able to get full body scans when we want them at the doctor's office and also not get them at airports when we don't want them (like when we are no longer worried that people hate us because we support their oppressors because everyoen is afraid there is not enough stuff or energy to go around...) See also, thanks to space age technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

Or 21st century enlightenment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
http://johncr8on.com/projects/21st-century-institutions/

See also the late James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

I guess no amount of fancy technology by itself can transcend irony or stupidity:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

Here are some heterodox economic solutions for our society to embrance as it transitions to greater material abundance by the sort of positive future-oriented thinking NASA does (or did?):

Also: http://www.google.com/#q=peer+review+as+censorship
http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur02262010.html
http://www.suppressedscience.net/censorship-medicine.html

A key point being that keeping information from the public is not the same as modding up (or revising interactively) information like on slashdot. What would slashdot be like if every comment needed "peer review" before it was posted? Instead, slashdot uses after the fact moderation. (Nothing is perfect, of course.)

In general:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=37
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

And from a previously posted link (from 1994 from the Vice Provost of Caltech, and it has probably gotten worse since):
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. ..."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://books.google.com/books?id=hM_JDjq6V-kC
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

See also my comment here on how it's all about our social paradigm:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1883960&cid=34448172

"We will find other unmet wants to work on."

As I explain at the knol and elsewhere, that assumes a few things:
* People in general will not continue a move towards environemntal consciousness, voluntary simplicity, spiritual gorwth, and moving up malsow's heierarchy of needs to more social interaction and self actualization which generally is fairly cheap to do.
* Virtualization using computers won't meet these needs (so, owning a big mansion, but in Second Life where it is cheap to have one);
* Productivity will not continue to rise faster than any ncrease in demand;
* Most human labor will remain valuable because robotics and other automation, better design, and/or voluntary social networks will never be able to do most jobs (or avoid the need to do them) better than most paid labor can do the work; and
* There will not be increasing concentration of wealth through low barganining power for labor as ever more peoeple are put out of work, where at best workers need to take on debt leading to bubbles to continue to consume.

If any one of those assumptions prove false, an income-through-jobs link can't work, as productivity will outpace demand. It seems like all of them are becoming false in our current economic system.

At some point, excessive greed and financial obesity may be seen as a sign of mental illness, not a sign someone should be a leader...

See also:
    "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel

See James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear for a story about a better future...
    http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

More by me on ways forward:
    http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402

For guarding these (not that I like the idea):
    "South Korea's Machine Gun Sentry Robot"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ

And see James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" (1979) for a good depiction of maintenance drones that repair and extend a computer network.
    http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
    http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm

So, in the long term, there are even fewer jobs from this than you pessimistically (but accurately) predict.

We need to rethink the fundamentals of an economy based on the idea of work-or-starve even as our economy can produce endless goods and services easily now using robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks... Some ideas I put together on that are here:
    http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives

On whether the simulation argument is like creationism, well, science can't really prove or disprove stuff about what caused first causes or by definition access any context outside a virtual server and firewall (if such exist), since science requires experiment, prediction, repeatability, accessibility, and so on. Access to those mysteries outside a simulated sandbox we might live in would probably be precluded by a well-written virtual machine (unless we found the debugging hooks? :-) Although who knows at what point someone might network our server to others? :-) Maybe when we "discover" other civilizations around other stars? :-) We also have to accept that everything like the fossil record could be faked (or at least just evolved once and then put in place billions of times from backup copies, same as you or I might provision a billion Virtual Servers in a cloud all from a standard GNU/Linux distribution configured once). And I say that as someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time. :-) Although with that said, about accepting the possibility of a God who is into fakery, it doesn't get us very far to pretend evolution does not happen given we can see it happening every year with various diseases evolving, so it's not really that useful a mental construct to think that a God exists who is intentionally misleading (or cruel) in that way (whether it is true or not). Evolution is a really useful idea in science and design and prediction, so it makes sense to work from that basis, given all the evidence (although there remain the mysteries of consciousness itself, identity, and a host of other related issues). Besides, with lots of CPU, it might just be easier to grow everything from scratch (a big bang?) each time anyway, maybe just altering seeds or constants a little here and there, sort of like booting up a GNU/Linux box; so on a practical basis, evolution might be a reality in each simulation essentially from a big bang.

We do something like that with growing plants from a seed in our PlantStudio software -- each time you grow it, we regrow it from scratch using a seed number for the random number generator that translates into a specific branching pattern for the plant that goes repeatedly with that random number seed and other parameters you have chosen.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/

One alternative to thinking we are living in a "simulation" is a "many worlds" quantum viewpoint, but maybe they are essentially the same in implications anyway? :-)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

The recently late :-( James P. Hogan wrote about these kinds of ideas -- both life in a simulation (in Entoverse), and many worlds interpretations in his other works (Star Child, Paths to Otherwhere, etc.).
    http://www.jamesphogan.com/
I hope his spirit (if such exists) is onto better things (if they exist, either in otherwheres, other virtual machines, or other planes of reality, or something beyond our imagining).

Human behavior is a product of many things, genetics, parenting, history, nutrition, community, environment, and others...

As I see it, you are asking, what do we do about psychopaths, and their lesser cousins, bullies?
"[p2p-research] The psychopath as peer?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005499.html

As Jacque Fresco suggests in the following two videos, you can change the physical and social environment, and that will change a lot of human behavior in a healthier way, which is much better than passing laws:
http://www.youtube.com/user/jacquefresco#p/a/u/2/pbtbGcKiLiM
http://www.youtube.com/user/jacquefresco#p/a/u/1/PSbKfdOTRpY

And as you suggest, today's prisons in the USA create criminals. The USA has many times more people in prison than other industrialized countries,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
in large part because the sentences are way longer (part of that is that the prison industry is profitable to many who lobby for harsher laws or prevent removing harsh laws). For example, in New York State:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702834.html
"Then in November, Democrats captured the state Senate for the first time in years. The State Assembly in the past had proposed repealing the drug laws, but the effort was always blocked by Senate Republicans, many of whom represent largely rural, Upstate districts where most of the state's prisons are located."
And consider what was recently discovered in Pennsylvania:
"Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/index.html
Where else in the USA does this happen?

A basic income could remove much petty theft and physical crimes of mugging and armed robbery:
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Being non-violent does not mean being passive. We can actively work to create a better society that works for most everybody as an active process, especially in a democracy:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

The same as with terrorists, you may not be able to prevent individuals from planning to do harmful things, but what you can do is take away their social support network that enables them and provides cover for them to plan large scale harm. That goes for whether the terrorists are alienated fundamentalist extremists pursuing some radical cause, or ostensibly mainstream elected government officials invading other countries to remain in power and to create business opportunities for their friends.

Again, Voyage from Yesteryear is one picture of such an alternative society (even if it is not the only possible one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Because we live in such a schooled society, where most people have been broken and trained

Thanks. I've enjoyed our dialogue.

On your point, while I like the metaphor, we are not talking about real tapeworms. We are talking about human beings with a certain culture and a certain ideology that make them act like tapeworms. And we are talking about others who help them to be parasites through ignorance or not thinking they have options. How many kids join the military due to the "economic draft"?
http://www.workers.org/us/2005/economic-draft-0303/
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_Peace/Economic_Draft.html

And sure, many parasites got these wars going precisely so they could get a bit of the action, one dollar in their pocket for ever thousand dollars of tax payer money wasted. A key idea here:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

A good sci-fi book on this broader theme of abundance and war is James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage from Yesteryear".
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear

As he points out there, the tapeworms as you mention will not get much support if everyone else has abundance. Besides, in a word of abundance, if some "lunatic" wants to build self-replicating space habitats on the Moon, why worry about it? There would be plenty of energy and stuff to go around, and it might provide some amusement.

So, ask yourself, why do people want to be tapeworms? And why do others go along with their plans?

I think key issues are "ignorance" and "want":
"A Christmas Carol: Ignorance and Want"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MFN8yiVc0

But it is precisely abundance from the internet and robotics that may end ignorance and want.

So then, we are left mainly with the issue of mental illness to have people causing wars. Adequate vitamin D from supplements or sunshine can help relieve a lot of that too:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml

More resources for families could help relieve some of it too:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail--but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."

Hitler wanted to be a painter for example:
"Adolf Hitler painting may have hung in Sigmund Freud's surgery"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7221058/Adolf-Hitler-painting-may-have-hung-in-Sigmund-Freuds-surgery.html
Would he have turned to politics if he had not had to worry about selling his paintings?

Will the world always have a problem with bullies and the mentally ill who hoard w

Especially "Voyage From Yesteryear":
    http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"

Just like global warming, the idea that HIV causes AIDS is a consensus, but the proof is a wee bit lacking. James Hogan has written several blog posts on this topic. Just like global warming, there is too much money flowing into AIDS research and drugs for anyone to want to rock the boat...

http://jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=2&ed=5

THE SEARCHER

1.1 MILLION YEARS B.C.

1,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Had English-speaking humans existed, they would probably have translated the spacecraftâ(TM)s designation as "searcher." Unmanned, it was almost a mile long, streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it operated fully under the control of computers. The alien civilization was an advanced one, and the computers were very sophisticated.

The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was the fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race of alien gods, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasnâ(TM)t much to look at: an airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of boulders and debris from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of volcanic ash and dustâ" but the searcherâ(TM)s orbital probes and surface landers found a crust rich in titanium, chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, uranium, and many other valuable elements concentrated by thermal-fluidic processes operating early in the planetâ(TM)s history. Such a natural abundance of metals could support large scale production without extensive dependence on bulk nuclear transmutation processesâ"in other words, very economicallyâ"and that was precisely the kind of thing that the searcher has been designed to search for. After completing their analysis of the preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed and transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their intentions, and then activated the vesselâ(TM)s descent routine. Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers, radiation monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the ship and dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface features selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the ship and processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked, legged, and wheeled mining, drilling, and transportation robots went out to begin feeding ores and other materials back to where more machines had begun to build a fusion-powered pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was constructed next, followed by a parts assembly facility, and step by strep the pilot plant grew itself into a fully equipped, general-purpose factory, complete with its own control computers. The master programs from the ship were copied into the factoryâ(TM)s computers, which thereupon became self-sufficient and assumed control of surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.

Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as intended, but the alien engineers had created their own counterpart of Murphy and allowed for his law in their plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and routine wear and tear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down causes of production rejects and adjusted the machines for drifting tolerances; breakdown teams brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and specialized scavenging robots roamed the surface in search of wrecks, write-offs, discarded components, and any other likely sources of parts suitable for recycling.

Time passed, the factory hummed, and the robot population grew in number and variety. When the population had attained a critical size, a mixed workforce migrated a few miles away to build a second factory, a replica of the first, using materials supplied initially from Factory One. When Factory Two became self-sustaining, Factory One, its primary task accomplished, switched to mass- production mode, producing goods and materials for eventual shipment to the alien home planet.

While Factory Two was repeating the process by commencing work on Factory Three, the labor detail from Factory One picke

James P. Hogan's "Giants" trilogy (but the 4th book, "Entoverse" is for adults). First book is Inherit the Stars , about an odd situation involving a dead astronaut on the Moon who died 50,000 years ago.

"Free" may be the only thing that "works" in the the long term, check out:

    "Why work"
    http://www.whywork.org/

    "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

    "A critique of a neo-futurist's vision of the decline of work" by Bob Black
    http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm

    "RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine."
    http://www.reprap.org/

    "The Triple Revolution" letter to the president sent in 1964
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

"Free" used to work in the past in America:
    http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Let's hope "free" works again in the future, or we may get this:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"In other words, Manna spread through the American corporate landscape like wildfire. And my dad was right. It was when all of these new Manna systems began talking to each other that things started to get uncomfortable."

A sci-fi novel about a clash of old and new ways of thinking:
    _Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan
      http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29

Interesting thread!
Your thoughts remind me of the SF book A voyage from yesteryear by James Patrick Hogan. In this book there is a planet with people on it that have never had any need for materially competing with each other, because they were raised by robots from a starship, and a robots provide everything they could possibly need. These people get their selfrespect from actually being able to do something well, it's their only measure. It doesn't really matter what they're good at, as long as it's something. Our "I've got more than you do" society meets their society, and the results are quite interesting.
Bart

I agree that a resonable approach might be to take a look at the actual evidence instead of "tossing out the baby with the bathwater".

Unfortunately, while we may champion the cause of science, I'm not always sure that most scientists (or at least the vocal ones), are able to look at evidence and question the beliefs they work in.

I remember seeing an article in Scientific American that explored how the Physics world was mostly static (at the time), and that they expected a major revolution soon to shake things up (similar to volcanic action of 'startling discovery' followed by development and then stagnation/domancy within a scientific field, until the next major discovery).

If you're interested in a different way of looking at things, I recomend Kicking the Sacred Cow by James P. Hogan. He's an interesting character (check out the Biography section), and the book poses a few interesting questions. Wether you agree or disagree with the ideas he brings forth, he's pretty good about including bibliographic notes so you can do your own "further research".

I'd recomend it for most Slashdot readers who are curious about a critical view of dogmatic scientific belief, but not of the scientific process itself.

In an individualist way, Paul Graham is ignoring the bigger picture, and just advising individuals on how to have a better life in a failing society. There is nothing wrong with that kind of good advice by itself, and it is good advice, but it lacks social context, lacks long term planning, and lacks a way to make things permanently better for people without a lot of social advantages needed to follow that advice (let alone have time to read it).

From:
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."

Bob Black then goes on to say most work is unneeded, most of the rest can be made into fun, and the small remaining amount no one wants to do can be automated.

We have the system of "work" we do as a holdover from an agricultural feudal mindset coupled with a scarcity driven ideology (where dollars are really "ration units"). Compare this with, for example the better parts of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, see: "The Original Affluent Society -- by Marshall Sahlins"
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
for a description of life in a world where there is abundance for all with only a limited need for other-directed "work", where the productivity of the surrounding (living) system far exceeds that of collective human needs.

I don't see we have much of a good alternative to a post-work "utopia" for all;
"Utopia or Oblivian -- by Buckminster Fuller"
http://www.bfi.org/node/17
we either build the world Bob Black envisions (or something like it, whether Bucky Fuller's ideas, or see James P. Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_ novel for a related perspective,
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/tit lepage.shtml )
with abundance for all people, or, alternatively, by following the status quo off the cliffs of either pollution or warfare, humanity (though probably neither life nor intelligence nor humans) will perish in a world driven to destruction by putting abstractions like profits or nationalism ahead of basic human needs (including the basic human need not to be bored or demeaned eight hours a day). Does it all have to change in one day? No. You can build a better world bit by bit -- and that's one thi

Hogan's list of recommended reading on Astronomy, Cosmology and other subjects is here. I picked up Eric J. Lerner's and Tom van Flandern's books (The Big Bang Never Happened and Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, respectively), and they make for some fascinating reading.

Lerner, for example, proposes (or perhaps expands upon) a completely different set of theories for the formation of the universe in which plasma electrodynamics is one of the primary shapers and the universe is much older than suggested by the big bang theories. This theory eliminates the need for inflation, dark matter and energy, etc., and I think it's worth taking a serious look at.

Another interesting area that more people here may be familiar with is the research of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose most well know and controversial theory is that Venus was formed very recently and may have actually been thrown off by Jupiter. Some of Velikovsky's books are also listed on Hogan's site.

One of the things that I think is most important to realize about science is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO BELIEVE ANY OF IT! It's not religion; if something doesn't quite work, and there are other theories out there, we should be willing to consider them.

-podom

I can't wait for the society that exists to pursue its own interests with the zeal that comes from self-determination.

For a taste of that future, check out the writings of James P. Hogan, especially his novel _Voyage from Yesteryear_, http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/tit lepage.shtml
as well as his latests works like _Cradle of Saturn_ and _The Anguished Dawn_.

Darwin's theory may have only got it partly correct. Just as Newton's gravitation theory has been superceded by Einstein's theory.

This has some great discussions and a bibliography on problems with neo-Darwinism:

http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/archives/evolution.s html/

According to some, the 'analysis' was slanted to support the desired results (notice footnote #9 and wonder who decides if a paper is 'about climate change'). For more (and other fun reading) visit: http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/120604.shtml