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People accross the world need economic safety and social security in order to prevent terrorism I think some the Marshall Brain's ideas should be implemented world-wide. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

I think robotics is cool and all but anyone that thinks that making robots replace people is a good thing should read two stories.

Manna by Marshall Brain
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

and more importantly The Machine Stops,by E. M. Forester, written in 1909 and extremely prophetic
http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.ht ml

Political promises and arrogance go hand in hand. The misconception of the
majority is that our world is vast and therefore could never be damaged
irrepairably. This is made believable through watered down reports and
important factors being dismissed easily. How many ecological disasters
happen every year that were preventable. They get their several days of
fame and are forgotten.

Reports that claim 450ppm could be tolerated yet neglect to mention the
million square kilometers of permafrost in Russia releasing methane.
Methane which is said to be 20x worse than carbon dioxide. I saw a
documentary a few months ago that detailed extinction and that by 2050
37% of the earth's species will see their end. When do any articles
ever mention the effect on the food chain? This issue shouldn't be
about our survival. But rather the damage we are responsible for.
I could go on and on listing every little factor contributing to this
planet's problems... but this article on slashdot will have become
just another archive by that time. We are in the grips of the sixth
mass extinction we can see:

http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldre dge2.html

The truth is "an asteroid could slam into earth and they'll be wiped
out anyway" is not positive reinforcement on the issue at hand. We have
the capabilites to work together as a whole and salvage our conscience.
But wars, religious disputes, racism, and poverty prevent it. Could
economy itself be the biggest problem? Star Trek mentioned this very
thing when Picard had a discussion with a woman whom had stowed away
on the Enterprise.

An interesting proposal is one that drug addicts use for rehab:

"Just for today." We are so busy focusing on goals and missing the
importance of doing something today. Environmental aggreements that
see meetings happening every few years??? Due to humanity's separations
in culture and the unfortunate focuses modern society imposes on us all
will bring our only salvation being robotics. We need help and it will
be them that salvage this planet. Solutions they will provide that we
cannot; or we are incapable of carrying out.

Jobs lost you say? What good are they if we can't live on the planet!
This is our lifeboat ladies and gentlemen... we keep poking holes in it
and she can't repair it fast enough. Read this:

http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

I see nothing but truth in this article... unfornately why are we so
important? We are concerned with our well being and there is a real
breaking point that we have met and might just be too late. Our
societies have become remedial and no longer focus on cures. The
meek shall indeed inherit.

Thank you for your time.

I read the review, and it sounds like Kurzweil is too optimistic for me... personally, I found Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation to be much closer to the reality that I think is coming up for us.

Also check out Manna by Marshall Brain. This time communism is built in Australia and people from the USA are liberated by the emissaries from the Australian Project. The auther denies that he is in any way for communism, however, just proving again, how deep every American was affected by masterfully crafted Cold War anti-communist propaganda...

But the masses were happy in the Soviet Union. They are happy in Cuba as well and you would be surprised to find out that they are generally happy in Vietnam and North Korea as well. Of course, you would never ever read about it from most American newspapers or see it on American TV. I hope you don't hold any naive hopes of your media being objective and honest, do you?

Yes, people in communist countries are not as rich as they are in the "first world". But this is extremely simple to explain - they just don't have a "third world" to exploit! As simple as that.

But they got everything they had by their own labour. And they distributed the wealth equitably. Yes, Soviet people were never as reach as people from American upper-middle class, because they didn't have tens of struggling low-income workers and a hundred of poverty-stricken slaves as some rich Americans seem to do...

There is hope, however. Robotics, AI and nanotechnology will inevitably make means of production easily manufacturable. And that would mean instant death of capitalism. As soon as people would be able to make their own means of production, capital will become irrelevant and the world will gradually change into communism. It won't be easy and it would be a hundred years later than it could have happened, but it is inevitable.

Technology isn't the cause of human strife or prosperity; humans and how they use it are.

Wal*Mart speeding up their lines is a move to provide more production per unit investment. It's motivated by profit, plain and simple. (Not that it's a bad thing.) Now, if they passed these benefits along to the public, either through paying their employees more or hiring more people, that would be a good thing. The greatest benefit for the most people. If they used it to eliminate workers and pay their shareholders and executives more, that would be a bad thing, since it benefits the fewest number of people.

I don't want to get into a debate about trickle-down economics. I'm just trying to make the point that this isn't a good or bad thing. What we make of it is how we'll be judged by history.

As a gamer, a game developer, and a programmer in a lab that focuses on educational software explicitly designed to motivate students, the technology does scare me.

The technology to hit the pleasure centers that motivate humans is only in its infancy, but already having effects in addiction. People are already expanding our research beyond simple pavlovian reward stimuli. At GDC 2004, a psychology consultant for Microsoft games gave a talk focused around motivation curves and how to design games that maximized long term engagement (motivation type x will generally degrade at this rate, so after y minutes of gameplay offer new task types, and here are the motivation profiles for those tasks). In the education domain, we are beginning to look at the different effects of various intrinsic and extrinsic motivations on different personailties.

At what point is it the responsability of the software developer to build shutdown timers into the system? Maybe thresholds of gameplay (actual user input/interaction, not just sitting at a pause screen) over the last 8 hours, 24 hours, and 72 hours will trigger enforced breaks of progressively longer duration or just "have you eaten?" reminders.

What happens when the same technology is put into marketing? Can adware be designed to engage the user to the point practically gauranteeing a purchase?

What about the merger of the two domains? Pizza Hut already has code inside Everquest 2. This is from a application that already requires a credit card, and thus could easily look up your address and offer you a timely list of local delivery food every 4 hours. ("You've just played through your local dinner time. I bet you're hungry for one of these fine establishments still open in your area!!") As games become more adaptive, it will be easier for applications to insert more subtle hints. (Two hours into a quest with your party, you come across a ranger's camp with the smell of a fresh roast wafting through the air.)

Some would say we are beginning to allow machines to dominate human culture. The extreme view is something along the line's of Marshall Brain's Manna story (fast food workers as the arms an legs of a persuasive computer manager in a headset) and associated Robot Nation essays.

Anm

As a gamer, a game developer, and a programmer in a lab that focuses on educational software explicitly designed to motivate students, the technology does scare me.

The technology to hit the pleasure centers that motivate humans is only in its infancy, but already having effects in addiction. People are already expanding our research beyond simple pavlovian reward stimuli. At GDC 2004, a psychology consultant for Microsoft games gave a talk focused around motivation curves and how to design games that maximized long term engagement (motivation type x will generally degrade at this rate, so after y minutes of gameplay offer new task types, and here are the motivation profiles for those tasks). In the education domain, we are beginning to look at the different effects of various intrinsic and extrinsic motivations on different personailties.

At what point is it the responsability of the software developer to build shutdown timers into the system? Maybe thresholds of gameplay (actual user input/interaction, not just sitting at a pause screen) over the last 8 hours, 24 hours, and 72 hours will trigger enforced breaks of progressively longer duration or just "have you eaten?" reminders.

What happens when the same technology is put into marketing? Can adware be designed to engage the user to the point practically gauranteeing a purchase?

What about the merger of the two domains? Pizza Hut already has code inside Everquest 2. This is from a application that already requires a credit card, and thus could easily look up your address and offer you a timely list of local delivery food every 4 hours. ("You've just played through your local dinner time. I bet you're hungry for one of these fine establishments still open in your area!!") As games become more adaptive, it will be easier for applications to insert more subtle hints. (Two hours into a quest with your party, you come across a ranger's camp with the smell of a fresh roast wafting through the air.)

Some would say we are beginning to allow machines to dominate human culture. The extreme view is something along the line's of Marshall Brain's Manna story (fast food workers as the arms an legs of a persuasive computer manager in a headset) and associated Robot Nation essays.

Anm

Since I am a fan of the Robotic Nation, I find this post to be right on target: Robotic Education. Computer aided instruction using a video-game-like interface could radically improve the delivery of science education to students. Many schools, apparently, are starting to head in that direction: Why millions of teachers will be out of work soon....

Dunno if you've read this or not.

The question that I would like to pose in this article is a simple one: How are we, as a society, going to respond to this robotic revolution? If we handle it properly, the arrival of robots could be an incredibly beneficial event for human beings. If we do not handle it properly, we will end up with millions of unemployed people and a severe economic downturn that will benefit no one. Can we modify the American economy now to prevent this downturn? Are there things that we can do today to smooth the transition to the robotic nation?

Manna

correct and here is the link

If you study current technology trends, you can make some fairly realistic guesses about what will happen, and what will not happen.

Unlikely within 100 years: Faster than Light Travel. Terraforming.

Likely within 100 years: Augmented Reality, followed by Virtual Reality. Extremely powerful computers. Extremely capable robots. Artificial intelligence. Social upheval.

An example of "mundane" science-fiction consideration: Robots aren't going to be "their own people." Rather, they would be the appendages of intelligences existing on the Internet, inside of buildings, inside server farms. A "robot" intelligence lives in the walls, surfs the web easier than you or I, and inhabits any bodies it has access to around you.

When an intelligence must go to a hostile environment with unsecured communications channels, that is when it will enter a body, and work like R2D2 or C3PO. But it will be more like the intelligence budding off a small version of itself: It'll still be churning away, doing things at home, while a small fragment of it's intelligence and data will walk away with you in a body.

This is "Mundane" Science Fiction. It is still interesting, it is still exciting; It's just more realistic than space operas about bumbling robots that speak English when they want to communicate with one another.

Science Fiction is currently undergoing a rectification of possibilities as we think more carefully about deep Cybernetics (communications and control systems, not bionic arms) and what it all means for us.

The new "mundane" science fiction will feel cooler, better, more interesting, because it will be relevant and, in the words of Warren Ellis, it will make you Feel.

Because: You're going to be looking at your own future, and you're going to be thinking: "Oh shit, what's going to happen?" And these "mundanes" are the guys and gals who are going to be the ones who have some plausible answers.

The FTL crowd may seem interesting right now, but just give it another 10 years...

"Anonymous reader" most likely being "HowStuffWorks employee" or possibly even "Marshall Brain."

I wrote a little about this here , but you should also check out Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays for more. It might not be all good news for a rapid rise of robotic technologies. Espcially if the socio-economic factors aren't taken into consideration from the beginning.

For the tin foil hat crowd, heres an interesting essay about robots taking over,...and how it starts with general services:

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Marshal Brain agrees. He argues that fast-food workers (and service workers in general) will be one of the first major professions to be automated next (in the next few decades).

Marshal Brain agrees. He argues that fast-food workers (and service workers in general) will be one of the first major professions to be automated next (in the next few decades).

It's exactly what we're talking about here; it starts of with a fastfood chain that adopts a robotic manager, and ends up with most of humanity enslaved by robots. Pretty entertaining actually... http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Sounds like the buildings of the poor in the book Manna</ a>.

In the future only the wealthy 1% will live in actual buildings/houses. The rest of us get this inflatable bag of cement.

Sounds fun.

That's correct, but you miss the point (just like 90% of all posters in this thread) of the project. It's not to create amazing robosaurus. It's to showcase the technology. Over the next few years it will gradually start being used. Soon (in 10 years or so) we will have many robots that we saw and read about in sci-fi. In 20 years robots will be perfected (including humanoid robots) to the level of Bicentennial Man and I, Robot.

People are so shortsighted, it's scary. They will pretend that all these robots are either useless toys or an elaborate scam, until a dog robot bites them in the ass or a cluebot hits them with a stick. But it doesn't have to be that way - all the information that we need to draw up a decent foresight is available. Please, people, get serious. Read Manna or another book to get some understanding of what robots mean to us, humans.

It's pathetic, out of 13 comments rated 3+ only 2 are serious. The rest are lame jokes.

And Lessig misses this point, as he is trying for compromise.

Some related issues:

If copyrights impose a burden on society (like real estate), why not tax them annually at some self-assessed buyout value (the cost the copyright holder would be content with to have the work in the public domain)?

Oh, but copyright holders might protest they can not fairly evaluate the copyright as some copyrights make a lot of money, and most do not. But there we have it -- the notion of copyright as a lottery ticket which the essay touches on. Do we want creative works funded as lotteries?

Also, with the increasing use of automation and robotics, people are less and less needed to produce things, so ultimately most people will become out of work in our society -- unless they get a guaranteed income in terms of a part of the production of the automated systems. If people had such a guaranteed income, then they would not need an incentive to create digital works, and they would not need to receive royalties from copyrights just to get the basics of food, water, shelter, education, manufactured goods, and medical care for themselves and their children.

So the future you are talking about is bound up into issues like a guaranteed income or fair share of rapidly increasing industrial productivity. So essentially a "Star Trek" like society, with matter replicators -- which are at most ten or twenty years away, as people are using limited prototypes of them now. Remember, thirty years ago, for most people there was no such thing as desktop publishing or local printing. Now you typically get a printer bundled for "free" with a computer. Thirty years from now, it may seem as ludicrous to get something other than raw materials delivered or to go out to shop for an object as it would seem now to have one-off printing done at some remote computer center (as was typical thirty years ago).

Related links:

The Abolition of Work
http://www.deoxy.org/endwork.htm

Robot Nation
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

The Dream Factory: Any product, any shape, any size - manufactured on your desktop!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/view.html ?pg=4

Getting Paid in Our Jobless Future: Only a guaranteed basic income can ensure economic growth, technological innovation and social welfare
http://betterhumans.com/Features/Columns/Change_Su rfing/column.aspx?articleID=2003-09-22-1

US BIG: The basic income guarantee (BIG) is a government insured guarantee that no citizen's income will fall below some minimal level for any reason. All citizens would receive a BIG without means test or work requirement. BIG is an efficient and effective solution to poverty that preserves individual autonomy and work incentives while simplifying government social policy. Some researchers estimate that a small BIG, sufficient to cut the poverty rate in half could be financed without an increase in taxes by redirecting funds from spending programs and tax deductions aimed at maintaining incomes.
http://www.usbig.net/

More discussion of "BIG" - Basic Income Guarantee (source of some links)
http://novogate.com/exco/thread.php?forumid=5374&t hreadid=79208

Reminds me of a story I once read.

You know what'll happen once droids take over McJobs.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

In this society, everything anyone did was tracked and searchable, so privacy and anonymity were nonexistent. However, this (practically) eliminated crime, as a side effect. With a 100% chance of getting caught and punished, the only crimes left would be crimes of passion, where the perpetrator doesn't care about the consequences.

It is, in my view, inevitable that no matter what your starting conditions are, the socio-economic progress will lead to convergence of all systems to communism, a more advanced one than traditional capitalism or (horror!) information society.

Many people still don't realise it, but our world is changing. And it doesn't take a genius to understand where we are going. Combine MIT's 'Fab Labs' (not the implementation, the idea), nanotechnology and sharing and you get sharing for physical goods. Add to that AI and robotics and you don't even need to share, because everyone basically has everything he needs. Which is, in very simple terms, what communism is about.

In about 5-10 years it will be possible to have personal manufacturing plants - first for some limited classes of products, then for pretty much everything. That would bring sharing of designs, often "illegal", but always beneficial to people. It is likely to be combined with open source leading to even more efficiency and choice.

Then in about 15-20 years robots will become a very significant part of the workforce, with construction robots, transportation robots, loading/unloading and various other robots. Not sure how it will work out, but clearly this will lead to 1) greater wealth for some and 2) demand to do something so that even the unemployed people could share the wealth. It might be possible that robots could be produced using personal manufacturing plants, in that case the capitalist economy will quickly collapse, as capital (robots) will become in a sense free (there still be energy and resources issues). That might be when the new communism, finally succeeds.

Finally, in 20-30 years nanotechnology will succeed in producing its Holy Grail - the universal assembler. This would bring sharing to its ultimate triumph, as information would finally be the only thing of value and at the same time the information will finish becoming free, in the process freeing us, the humans. This will also end the short communist era, as we humans quickly become self-sufficient. That would be the culmination of the new communism, which will then gradually disappear, as humans move into posthuman state.

In 2030 our current debates about sharing and whether it's stealing or not will probably seem rather funny.

This was covered on /. when it was new... link enough burger stores together and you never know what will emerge! This is a ~great~ essay. Really makes you think. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm I for one welcome our new Roomba overlords!

See also Manna, a story about such software, and its logical extrapolation.

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm The (possible) robotic nation of the future. Also read the "Manna" short story. It will happen, probably sooner rather than later.

Robotic Nation is the future.

You are so out of touch with reality it's not even funny. There are many purposes to business, but being a guaranteed source of employment is not one of them.

I agree, but what happens to the great unwashed once automation bumps up the unemployment rate to 10 or 20 percent or higher? The usual, not-very-well-thought-out response is something like, "well, they'll just maintain and build the software and cool robots".

Maybe Robotic Nation wasn't so far off.

Robotic Nation

Robotic Nation by Marshall Brain, a great read on our appending doom.

I for one, welcome our new robot overlords. :\

Check out the series of essays on:

• Manna software that "runs" service oriented businesses, therefore driving down wages
• Robotic Nation about how robots are slowly taking over "routine" type jobs.

I'm sure this was covered in Slashdot sometime before, but Marshall's essays are eerie when juxtaposed with this article.

Check out the series of essays on:

• Manna software that "runs" service oriented businesses, therefore driving down wages
• Robotic Nation about how robots are slowly taking over "routine" type jobs.

I'm sure this was covered in Slashdot sometime before, but Marshall's essays are eerie when juxtaposed with this article.

btw. I'm taking the "replace ourselves with AI machines?" path you suggested. Resistance is futile. See Manna example

There is also new intrest for the insights of Carl Marx (yes! the guy communist's worship) among economist circles. Instead of suggesting that workers should make revolution and use violence. Marx tought that communism is rational outcome from capitalism (surprise!). You can actually see it coming. Machines and robots automate physical labour, now self servise machines (web pages, teller machines etc.) take away service jobs. Eventually there comes limit where most of the human population is not smart enough to have any job that pays real money (real money means enough $$$ to keep you realatively happy). Rich people have to pay to the poor so that they stay calm and don't become terrorists/unhappy/troublemakers. It does not nesseserily mean that there is big coverment controlling this. It may be realized as kind of insurance against masses. If you give the masses enough money to buy tv, beer, pizza and painkillers, without too heavy work they will not take take the hard route (can you imagine fat american suburbanists heading to the hills fighting guerilla war after Patriot Act Plus Plus takes finally away all their rights to privacy) and can't threaten the rich and powerful. All remaing agression can be directed to easily managed violence (see soccer hooliganism) where poor people fight poor in small scale.

Do you realize how depressing what you've said is!

I realize you're trying make a point... but still... There's a lot of ideas that would disagree with you, after all people don't last as long as land does. Communism has failed, capitalism is having paranoid delusions and failing in just an ugly way. Might I suggest technological based anarchy such as Eco Anarcho-syndicalism?

If you'd like a interesting although american capitalist centric read try: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

Marshall Brain wrote a blog post where he joked about the way we pick any explanation that feels scientific.

Explaining why smokers have more sex: "Here's a theory. Perhaps, way way back in the evolutionary chain, humans have a long-extinct ancestor that had long, thin, tusk-like incisors jutting out of its mouth. And perhaps, residually, our brains are programmed to recognize that "long incisors" means "good mate". So when a person puts a cigarette up to his or her mouth, it triggers the "long incisors" circuit in our brains, and cigarettes get associated with sex in that way. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? That's because it is ridiculous -- there must be a better theory."

Right now, people seem to buy up anything that sounds like Evolutionary Psychology. The attitude is: "It is scientific. Therefore, it must be true. Anything else would be religion or emotion."

It's funny how almost every sentence in your post is false and full of prejudice. Rather it would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Why do Americans have so much hatred for something which never threatened them (only in their nightmares, or in response to their own threats)? Possibly because they do not understand it.

First, oligarchs are the manifestation of capitalism, not anything else. Concentration of capital in private hands is a result of capitalism. If that is not capitalistic, I don't know what is. The prosperity in China is the result of huge capital investments, which are in turn results of openining the economy. Whether it's capitalist or communist, the economy will in most cases grow when you infuse lots of capital in it. The only argument that can be made from Chinese experience is that central control of the economy can be beneficial, while relinquishing that control (like in Russia) can be deadly, because free market sometimes fails spectacularly. Your comment about lack of infrastructure in Russia is outright ignorant.

2. My argument was completely relevant to your speculation about why America is prosperous. Because it wasn't plundered by occupants, that's why, among other things. This is relevant to capitalism vs communism in as much as it invalidates your argument that the USA is rich simply because it is capitalist.

You don't see two nations with free trade going to war, do you?
Look up "History" in the library.

3. Your argument about communism bankrupting Russia is retarded. Capitalism bankrupted Russia, as any economic indicator will tell. You can't argue with facts (or, should I say, a rational person can't argue with facts - it appears you can)

So in a few countries communist government killed many people. So what? How is that related to them being communist? Given that the majority (99%) of communist leaders didn't start mass repressions and only a handful of them did, perhahs something else was at work?

Following Marx's directions, the Soviet Union put alot of power into the hands of a few
I suspect you don't know what you are talking about, because you never read Marx and pick up all your information about communism from propaganda in your school. Am I correct?

If you want to throw in private education into the mix, no educational system in the world produces the results that private institutions do in the United States.
Except, not surprisingly, the educational system of the Soviet Union. :) Funny that USSR was renowned for having the best systems of both school and university education.

4. I haven't read any of Fukuyama's material, so I don't really know what you're trying to say about that...
I am just trying to say that your beliefs in the eternal firmness of the capitalist society closely resemble that particular brand of bullshit that was spouted by Fukuyama and refuted countless times. No wonder that you came with the same idea without reading his (or other) books - you don't need much education or intelligence to shout "Our system is the best, their system is the evil!"

It's kind of funny, while you're ignoring the many many millions of people killed, or otherwise forced to revert to neolithic standards of living, by communism, you continue to claim that communism is not only inevitable, but also a beneficial thing.
You don't know what neolithic age is, do you? Communism is not really beneficial per se (it's spelled "per se", not "per say", because it comes from Latin, but they don't teach it in the brilliant private institutions of the US), it's just the most feasible social order when you have nearly unlimited productive capability. Read Marshall Brain's Manna to get a simple explanation of how it may work. Ironically, Brain is also a victim of American anti-communist propaganda (or he just doesn't want to scare people like you) and denies that he is writing about communism, even though he is

Then you will have to move to Cuba. Cuba may not be the best place to live right now due to the economic difficulties caused by the embargo and the collapse of the socialist countries worldwide, but you can't deny that the government there (and Fidel in particular) cares deeply about the wellbeing of the people. Education and health systems there are nothing short of spectacular. And every kid gets free (as in beer) milk until he is 6 years old (not kidding).

I am sure that even if American corporations (with bought politicians) limit the access to robots, some of the remaining communist/socialist states will use the technology (robots + AI) to finally build communism, just as they wanted to do for a century now. It may end up being kind of like Australia Project in Brain's Manna.

A highly recommended link!

I found Robotic Nation to be a very good read. Fascinating and disturbing at the same time (particularly the portion about concentration of wealth, IMO). Even if you don't agree with what Marshall Brain presents, the information stirs one to think about the impact of technology on humanity. After all, in our time on this planet humans have never been anything but selfish creatures. We don't preserve things for their own sake, we preserve them for our sake. At the very lowest level humanity is the only thing that matters.

Thanks to WillWare for the link.

Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.

Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.

Then, read James Lowen's _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong_ to see how your mind has unknowingly been filled with nationalist and consumer crap (despite your technical proclivities). Also check out Howard Zinn. Learn to live simply and frugally so you have more options:

If you have started doing all that, by now you are primed to begin to question what education really means.

And further, to even question why people need to work and what it should mean to do useful things.

You'll have time to read great minds like Bertrand Russel and Freeman Dyson.

Then you can accept you are still stuck in a stupid system.

But you'll be positioned to make the best of it and yet still see how the world can be a made better place to for the bulk of humanity and other creatures.

Always remember in your darker hours to at least ask yourself the question, "Can life be made worth living?" And in your brighter hours, remember to ask yourself if you are playing a finite (to win) game or an infinite (to play) game?

And, finally, for continual inspiration, read _Voyage From Yesteryear_ by James P. Hogan.

Now go out and take some educated risks to try to make life worth living -- despite your future happiness possibilities already almost being ruined by being convinced you that you are "bright" just because you know some technical things (same thing almost happened to me).

"Welfare" is the accurate word, but it's dirty too; better to call it a "living wage", or a "'fair' dividend from the fruits of collectively-owned AUTOMATED production", or just a $25G stipend.

Offshoring is just the beginning of the increasing "screw everyone else" trend...

--

Without investment capital, many ideas cannot get off the ground; VC firms lose money all the time as they invest in new ideas.

And people like you forget that the economy is a myth- a shared myth, but still a myth. If we actually WANTED to advance as a race instead of just make money, we wouldn't put mythological obstacles in people's way trying to get new ideas off the ground in the first place. There SHOULD be no risk in new ideas at all; and if we had an economic system more like the one demanded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Robotic Nation then we wouldn't need the venture capitalists or investors at all. Just survive on wellfare until your idea gets off the ground.

But no- redesigning the economic system for maximum efficiency would be stupid, wouldn't it?

Manna, Chapter 1

Here's a teaser from the story..

"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17, 2010. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history."

And a decentralized model in which people are forced to work in order to support someone else is some sort of significant improvement?

That would be no improvement at all over the current centralized systems. After all, under capitalism, the majority of your work is to support your boss's salary, and his boss, up to the stockholders, who do nothing to earn their way.

At least the "centralized" models of socialism don't use a a veneer of public relations to hide what they do to people.

You mean like Enron and Worldcom did?

Socialism in any form is oppression

Except in the form where WORK and SURVIVAL are completely unrelated (see Robotic Freedom for details of a form of socialism that would actually turbocharge capitalism- and allow for maximum human potential while shedding mindless jobs better done by non-humans).

Socialism failed in the 1920s (and it did actually fail in the 1920s- it just took another 50-75 years before governments figured out that it DID fail) because human labor back then was scarce. Heck, there were only 2 billion human beings on the planet back then- as compared to 6 billion now. NOTHING was automated to any great extent- and the majority of people working in factories back then were little more than cogs in the great machine that is an industrial age factory.

As the current "Jobless Recovery" is proving, we can do that work for less; cheap labor overseas (read slavery) or robotic automation here (productivity) or cheap skilled labor brought in from overseas (exploitation) can all do the job FAR cheaper than paying an American $40,000/year can. Thus, we shouldn't be paying Americans that much money to do work better done by others. Instead, we should tax the excessive profits (who needs more than $1.3 million a year to do ANYTHING THEY WANT?!?!? And that's only 1000x minimum wage) and provide an "American Fund" just like the "Alaska Residents Fund" to give poor people more money to spend- thus creating a consumer class that can be used by the rich to earn money from, which allows more people to hit that magical maximum wage, which allows us to put more people into the consumer class, and reduce the number of people working to survive to begin with!

That's the kind of socialism I'm for- freeing up the creative to be creative instead of chaining them down to a job just to put food on the table.

One big word- Price. Microsoft has been making an 85% profit for years now- soon to go to 95% when the Hydrabad R&D center gets in on a serious percentage of Longhorn Development. For those of us like This Guy who distrust the whole "Capitalism is about concentration of wealth" trend, this is a BAD THING . OSS is a solution to this- and ReactOS is an OSS solution that may, one day, have the potential to compete directly with Microsoft on that company's [SARCASM]greatest strength[/SARCASM], the Windows Platform.

P.S.- who says that WINE has failed? How can any project still in development be considered to have failed?