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Basically. Read Manna. We're approaching the point where we've got two options:

1) We acknowledge that in the past, there was lots of labor to do, and you did need to work for your meal or else you're burdening somebody else, which breeds resentment, strife, and generally fails as a large scale economic system. But today the necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter, power, water(?)) are not near so scarce, and we're just about to the point where robots can do everything needed to provide them for humans. So we can free humanity, and you no longer need to work or die. This doesn't mean "free everything for everybody all the time!" and there's still plenty of challenges to work out, as somebody still has to build and service the robots, etc, but yeah, if you just want to live in a house built by robots while robots grow your food and craft your necessities while you fish or jerk off all day, that's fine. You're not a burden to society because nobody else is slaving on your behalf.

2) We demand people work for their supper. But since the robots are doing all the work, nobody needs you. So you can't get a job. So you can't eat. And the benefit of the labor of the robots only benefits the owner of the robot. So fuck you.

It can pretty well go either way at this point.

Do yourself a favor and read "Manna" by Marshall Brain.
An excerpt:

America was no different from a third world nation. With the arrival of robots, tens of millions of people lost their minimum wage jobs and the wealth concentrated so quickly. The rich controlled America's bureaucracy, military, businesses and natural resources, and the unemployed masses lived in terrafoam, cut off from any opportunity to change their situation. There was the facade of "free elections," but only candidates supported by the rich could ever get on the ballot. The government was completely controlled by the rich, as were the robotic security forces, the military and the intelligence organizations. American democracy had morphed into a third world dictatorship ruled by the wealthy elite.

Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot.
The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible.

He may well believe that past results are no indication of future results, there's one overwhelmingly important fact that comes to mind: noone will be able to buy the stuff made in the robot factories if we're all unemployed or minimum wage serfs.

And if noone can buy the stuff, the owners aren't going to get rich selling the stuff. Which means THEY won't be able to buy stuff either....

No, but the rich folks will just own it all.

See Manna where robots take over. If you don't have a job, you get shuffled off to a jail-like facility where your basic needs are provided for at the whim of the owners who stuff you into a way-to-small box because they really want to sell that real estate you're "living" on with millions of other people.

That's not how it will work. It will be more like this:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

"Oh, you were fired from your last job? Well, there's 100 M others in the pool of wage slaves to pick from. Good bye".

Apparently Marshall Brain knows what he's talking about after all. http://marshallbrain.com/robot...

I periodically link Marshall Brain's "Manna" into these discussions ; his novel basically describes what you just said, only the rich guys "won" by ushering all the "useless poor" into government subsistence camps policed by robots.

His proposed robo-utopia is probably going to rub most libertarians up the wrong way, seeing as it includes panopticon surveillance and implants that can deprive you of your liberty (in exchange for a life of self-determinism and luxury that would otherwise give most of them a wet dream...).

Politics aside, the biggest problem with this is going to be the housing. Those "low end" apartments almost certainly didn't spring into existence at $0.96/sqft, but upgrading the 600,000 people from soggy cardboard is going to require a lot of new construction, and people building new things are going to want money for that wood, brick and property, even if the entire structure is built with robots. Terrafoam to the rescue, I guess.

That said, if you're willing to not own a lot of stuff or have a bedroom, it looks like 242sqft is plenty of space. It's probably pretty standard in Tokyo too.

Perhaps it's time for a little reading.

If we cooperate and realize that robots can serve us within limits, we can have a place where employment is optional (but still manage scarcity). Or if we just let greed take over and the robots will be the ones that oppress us.

Manna - By Marshall Brain explores these issues by seeing how machines initially take over, then following through with two different outcomes.

Of course the TL;DR version of it (I highly suggest reading the full thing first) is on Wikipedia.

Yep. Fictional examination of that: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

The first half seems all-too likely.

Wow, she was also an aunt of my father! Small world! :-) I think we might have commented on slashdot on that coincidence a few years back? But you'd have to be pretty old if she was your aunt, as opposed to, like me, a great aunt? I met her once with my father when she was still in her own home, and maybe incidentally another time or two perhaps (decades ago).

Glad that "open sourcing" runs in the family. :-) Although I might feel differently about open sourcing my body or DNA than open sourcing some software I've written. :-) Still, it is kind of a mental calculation of the risk that personal DNA sequences could be used against one or one's family somehow versus the benefits of medical breakthroughs for your own family and also everyone, and also that DNA is not that hard to get via copies of medical samples or from trash or whatever...

I've put some links in other replies to ideas about health sensemaking to help everyone live longer and healthier lives.
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

And while I was born and raised in the USA, maybe it shows some Dutch roots that I believe we can make more "land" for a growing population by reclaiming it from "space" in addition to the sea. Of course, with falling birth rated in industrialized countries, long term population growth does not seem to be one of our problems/blessings, even if many people start living a lot longer.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Health may be also be partially a function of what you do relative to your genes and environment, so her preferences, say, for orange juice and herring might have worked better for herself than for others in different situations. For health commonalities, one can read about "Blue Zones" and also I like Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work overall emphasizing eating more vegetables (but quibble about some parts).
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Attitude and "morale" is also a surprisingly big part, for many reasons including because it affects your connectedness to your community from which other good things flow. Probably easier to have higher morale in the Netherlands than in a much crazier place like the USA though. :-)

Contrast:
http://www.findingdutchland.co...
"According to Unicef's most recent Child Well Being in Rich Countries survey, Dutch kids ranked as the happiest kids in the world. Dutch kids led the way in three out of the five categories, namely- material well being, educational well being, and behavior and risks."

With:
https://www.adbusters.org/maga...
""The reason our children's lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""

Anyway, we're all not going to live that long unless we sort out some of the wealth inequality and distribution issues given the spread of AI, robotics, and other automation that makes most human labor less and less valuable economically. The following may sound silly in the Netherlands or other parts of Western Europe, but it sound all too plausible in the USA given current politics:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or t

Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th

There has always been a small percentage of aristocrats in society who do not have to work because of their amassed wealth. Looking at how they spent their time is probably a decent indicator of how most of the population will spend their time 50-100 years from now. My guess is most people will put far more effort into their hobbies, and many of those hobbies will turn into part time jobs. All basic and even most non-basic needs will be covered by social welfare programs paid for by publicly owned mostly-automated industries. People will only work because they want to, and the very few undesirable jobs that can't be automated will pay excessively well.

At least that is the best possible outcome. Their are plenty of dystopian possibilities as well.

AI replacing jobs is fine - as long as they're getting rid of grunt work jobs people hate doing and replacing them with higher quality, higher paying jobs that are more challenging.

Crap work jobs are the kind that offer no form of mental or physical stimulation or physical challenges that generally embody "good work". Physically demanding jobs like oil rig workers, (crab) fisherman, etc., appeal to few folks who really do enjoy the physical punishment and pain for a challenge they can do with their hands, while more creative industries like technology and culture appeal to those who wish to use their mental powers.

Crap jobs AI can probably take over would be stuff like janitorial work, simple assembly line style work where there is no physical challenge other than repetitive-strain injury and barely any mental stimulation.

As for the outcomes, unfortunately, the masses who toil will be the ones out of work and homeless while the rich buy up the land. Money is power, and power is not something that an AI really replaces. (It's actually those in power that will use AI to replace jobs to save on labor costs. The former employee is now jobless and has less money and thus power than when they were employed).

That's not to say it isn't impossible to have a place where humans are able to do work for the betterment of humanity than just toil around, but it needs to be a carefully designed and planned environment.

See Marshall Brain's Manna.

40-50%?!? Really?!?

All it will take is about 20%-25% unemployment for social order in the US to break down. The "thinkers" in govt, business and academia know this. The increasing militarization of the police, the complete disregard for the Constitution, the NSA monitoring everything, etc is getting ready for this. The canard of islamic terrorism was a good ploy and it has worked very well.

As much as I love the idea of robots creating a paradise on earth for humans to live out their fantasies and do what they all really ever wanted to do, without the need for working,etc; I just don't see that happening. Greed will win out. It always has.

Again I will reccomend the following good read on this subject: Manna by Marshall Brain.

So again, the question remains, and will continue to for the foreseeable future, what are the millions of soon to be unemployed going to do? Who will feed them, house them, etc?

I read a pretty interesting article about management by AI a few years back: "Manna"
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

It's over a decade old, but I think it's still relevant. It's kind of scary stuff, mostly because it's believable. The hopeful ending seemed a little less believable, unfortunately.

the people who are paying for the development and paying the power bills. Everyone else will be viewed as just a resource to be exploited.

Fictional take on this --- Marshall Brain's novella _Manna_ --- available free on-line: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

The first half seems all-too-likely, the second, likely impossible.

Those who do the basic workload for standard pay will be replaced by those who give everything they can for peanuts.

Those who give everything they can for peanuts will then be replaced by those who give everything they can for nothing, or next to nothing.

Then those will be replaced by automation.

Then what?

Has anyone here read this? http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

http://www.marshallbrain.com/c...

"Buckets seem so innocent -- how can a bucket kill a child? Unfortunately, about 20 children die in the U.S. every year because they drown in buckets."

If you're worried about one penis shot per year, and are willing to put fingerprint sensors on firearms to stop it, what kind of fingerprint sensor are you going to put on buckets, that *kill* 20 times more people?

Ready to regulate buckets, bitch?

Dr. Chun,

Have you read a short story about an AI boss called Manna? (I'll include relevant quotes if you don't have time.) How does your system for the Hong Kong subway compare? It's clearly similar to your subway system in some ways:

At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do.... Manna kept track of the hundreds of tasks that needed to get done, and assigned each task to an employee one at a time.

But does it micro-manage tasks like Manna?

Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance.

Does it record employee performance metrics and report them to (upper) management like Manna?

Version 4.0 of Manna was also the first version to enforce average task times, and that was even worse. Manna would ask you to clean the restrooms. But now Manna had industry-average times for restroom cleaning stored in the software, as well as "target times". If it took you too long to mop the floor or clean the sinks, Manna would say to you, "lagging". When you said, "OK" to mark task completion for Manna, Manna would say, "Your time was 4 minutes 10 seconds. Industry average time is 3 minutes 30 seconds. Please focus on each task." Anyone who lagged consistently was fired.

And how have employees reacted to their AI boss - if, in fact, you have been able to get honest evaluations from employees?

http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...

While I agree with the validity of your points for the next 10 to 20 years, in the longer term, better design and better tools will make it cheaper to completely rebuild houses so they are lower maintenance, more energy efficient, and easier to clean and maintain by robotics or by modular snap in replacements like the grandparent poster suggested. The only reason not to bulldoze older housing in a world of cheap energy and cheap robotics would be for historical preservation reasons or perhaps sentimentality (although Virtual Reality could address some of the sentimentality aspect).

This is similar to how people are now generally getting rid of old computer equipment (especially cellphones) when a capacitor or battery goes bad rather and replacing it with something new rather than trying to take it apart and repair the component like 50 years ago. "Computers" used to cost millions of dollars and take up rooms, now you can put a few in your pocket. I don't know what the equivalent shift for housing is, but we will no doubt find out. Some speculations are VR and pods like the Matrix or like in Marshall Brain's "Manna", or even just complete simulation of uploaded humans "living" in silicon RAM instead of air-filled wooden houses?

See also Marshall Brain's "Manna" for a suggestion of how computer-given instructions delivered by wearables could turn almost every profession, even plumbing, into a micromanaged low-wage nightmare before general robotics arrive:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"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. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history. ... Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance. The software would speak to the employees individually and tell each one exactly what to do. For example, "Bob, we need to load more patties. Please walk toward the freezer." Or, "Jane, when you are through with this customer, please close your register. Then we will clean the women's restroom." And so on. ... And Manna was starting to move in on some of the white collar work force. The basic idea was to break every job down into a series of steps that Manna could manage. No one had ever realized it before, but just about every job had parts that could be subdivided out.HMOs and hospitals, for example, were starting to put headsets on the doctors and surgeons. It helped lower malpractice problems by making sure that the surgeon followed every step in a surgical procedure. The hospitals could also hyper-specialize the surgeons. For example, one surgeon might do nothing but open the chest for heart surgery. Another would do the arterial grafts. Another would come in to inspect the work and close the patient back up. What this then meant, over time, was that the HMO could train technicians to do the opening and closing procedures at much lower cost. Eventually, every part of the subdivided surgery could be performed by a super-specialized technician. Manna kept every procedure on an exact track that virtually eliminated errors. Manna would schedule 5 or 10 routine surgeries at a time. Technicians would do everything, with one actual surgeon overseeing things and handling any emergencies. They all wore headsets, and Manna controlled every minute of their working lives.That same hyper-specialization approach could apply to lots of white collar jobs. Lawyers, for example. You could t

I replied, "We could change it now. Robots are doing all the work. Human beings -- all human beings -- could now be on perpetual vacation. That's what bugs me. If society had been designed for it somehow, we could all be on vacation instead of on welfare. Everyone on the planet could be living in luxury. Instead, they are planning to kill us off. Did you hear that women were trying to drink the water out of the river? Some people think they're putting contraceptives in the water."

From Manna.

Short and on this exact topic. http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Relevant. Must-read short story if you haven't.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Is it called Manna?

Obligatory reference to Manna

Marshall Brain has some very good ideas about what we could do as a society to ease our way past our 3rd generation society into a more-fair 4th generation post-scarcity society. http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Singularitarians may be nutty, but believing in a 'post-scarcity society' is worse. Threre will never be more resources than humans can use, unless you discover a way to magic stuff out of nothing, forever.

What was the uproar about actually? Were people afraid the computers would make mistakes and overcharge them or what?

Jobs.

Once upon a time, "computer" was a job title. It meant a guy who sat in a room with rows of desks, who did arithmetic on paper. Hundreds per room, doing calculations, in the same way that offices had secretarial pools full of typists, and so on.

The fear wasn't just that computers would put the accounting/clerical folks out of a job, it was that they'd put everyone out of a job. Nobody knew that AI was going to be an insanely hard problem, so once you got rid of the clerks and the typists, the next to go would be the accountants and secretaries, and so on and so forth, and eventually we'd all be slaves to robots.

So, basically, they feared the future described in "Manna", except that the tech was at least 50-80 years away from reality.

Back in the 50s, a guy whose only paid job duty was rote arithmetic was still a fully-fledged human being who could still be easily trained to sell insurance or enter some other profession that turned out not to be automatable with 60s tech. Today, not so much. If the steel is smelted and the cars assembled offshore, you can't turn 50000 steelworkers and car makers into coders in the space of a year. Burger flipping is also about to go bye-bye.

Must read:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Plus furniture for such "aliens" to sit on: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Even without DNA manipulation or 3D printing, AI and robotics are rapidly taking us "where no one has gone before". Although, that perhaps ignores slave holding elites throughout the ages, although slaves still had to be managed and could easily revolt?

In many ways, I consider Amazon to be a lot like a 3D printer -- just a very slow one that takes a couple days to print almost anything. Except I don't have that many replication ration units compared to a post-scarcity society, so I still have to make hard choices, plus I feel bad that many people in society can't access the Amazon replicators, which reduces my enjoyment plus makes society a riskier place to be. And I can't easily unprint stuff when I am done with it or want to store it.

By me from a decade ago on funding to create a Star Trek society: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Practical aspects: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Political ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

Education ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...

Economic ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/medi...

Others: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

With enough energy (such as from LENR someday perhaps, or hot fusion, massive solar, or thorium otherwise), almost everything become easy to recycle or clean up, like via huge mass spectrometers used to separate different atoms.
http://www.freeenergytimes.com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Others who make related points about abundance as well as its challenges to conventional economics:
http://worldtransformed.com/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
http://www.thelightsinthetunne...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
etc.

Manna, Chapter One
By Marshall Brain
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

"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. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.

Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting with its first restaurant in Cary. The Burger-G chain had an attitude and a style that said "hip" and "fun" to a wide swath of the American middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe Garcia. Over time, Burger-G grew to 1,000 outlets in the U.S. and showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G would soon be one of the "Top 5" fast food restaurants in the U.S.

The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called "Manna", version 1.0*.

Manna's job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way.

But the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no different. The problem was the quality of the fast food experience. Some restaurants were run perfectly. They had courteous and thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and high accuracy on the orders. Other restaurants were chaotic and uncomfortable to customers. Since one bad experience could turn a customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed stores were the Achilles heel of any chain.

To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born.

Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down. The software was also attached to the time clock, so it knew who was working in the restaurant. Manna also had "help buttons" throughout the restaurant. Small signs on the buttons told customers to push them if they needed help or saw a problem. There was a button in the restroom that a customer could press if the restroom had a problem. There was a button on each trashcan. There was a button near each cash register, one in the kiddie area and so on. These buttons let customers give Manna a heads up when something went wrong.

At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do. There were orders coming in from the cash registers, so Manna directed employees to prepare those meals. There were also toilets to be scrubbed on a regular basis, floors to mop, tables to wipe, sidewalks to sweep, buns to defrost, inventory to rotate, windows to wash and so on. Manna kept track of the hundreds of tasks that needed to get done, and assigned each task to an employee on

All the workers need to know is how to look up the correct Process and follow their check list. The Process will cover all scenarios and situations imaginable and should never be deviated from.

Sounds like Manna.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

"...I replied, "it's a new system they've installed called Manna. It manages the store."

"How so?"

"It tells me what to do through the headset."

"Who, the manager?"

"No, it's a computer."

He looked at me for a long time, "A computer is telling you what to do on the job? What does the manager do?"

"The computer is the manager. Manna, manager, get it?"

"You mean that a computer is telling you what to do all day?", he asked.

"Yeah."

"Like what?"

I gave him an example, "Before you got here, I was taking out the trash. Manna told me how to do it."

"What did it say?"

"It tells you exactly what to do. Like, It told me to get four new bags from the rack. When I did that it told me to go to trash can #1. Once I got there it told me to open the cabinet and pull out the trash can. Once I did that it told me to check the floor for any debris. Then it told me to tie up the bag and put it to the side, on the left. Then it told me to put a new bag in the can. Then it told me to attach the bag to the rim. Then it told me to put the can back in and close the cabinet. Then it told me to wipe down the cabinet and make sure it's spotless. Then it told me to push the help button on the can to make sure it is working. Then it told me to move to trash can #2. Like that."

He looked at me for a long time again before he said, "Good Lord, you are nothing but a piece of a robot. What is it saying to you now?"

"It just told me I have three minutes left on my break. And it told me to smile and say hello to the guests. How's this? Hi!" And I gave him a big toothy grin.

"Yesterday the people controlled the computers. Now the computers control the people. You are the eyes and hands for this robot....."

I was intensely disturbed by Manna when I first read it.

And I have yet to be given a reason to stop being frightened of the immediate future.

Interesting examination of that in the novella _Manna_ by Marshall Brain: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Why not?

But really, I think the chance to found a new world is enough of a reason in itself. The opportunity to create a utopia there in your own image, unfettered by the inertia of millennia-old society here -- where else could you imagine Manna happening?

This.

In fact, GO HERE. Now. Manna is telling you that you have 1 minute to open the link and perform a scan of the instructions at hand. Don't think. Just click the link. Manna will do all the thinking for you.

Another suggestion: read "Manna" by Marshall Brain, a (free) short story that brings up Marx' old question about the ownership of the means to production, in a society that is pretty much completely robotized. Even if you disagree with his view on how such a future will play out, it'll make for some interesting discussion.

interesting read, even though I'm past the age where I think it's possible: Manna, by Marshall Brain.

What, in your opinion, stands in the way of such a world happening? I don't necessarily believe it will as written in this story, either, but I'm interested in hearing your particular reasons for doubt.

To agree with your point to some extent, I think Elysium (the movie set partially in a space habitat) would have been a much better film if Jodi Foster as a villain had made the point that the solar system would be "full" in 1000 years of unchecked growth, and so as a matter of policy, the "unworthy" breeders on Earth had to be kept down and away from Elysium. I'm not saying I'd agree, but it would have provided a justification of her actions on a larger scale -- a justification very similar to that made by many wealthy people today or in years gone by.

"Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation"
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.u...

"Scientists have created the ultimate GM crop: contraceptive corn. ... The company, which says it will not grow the maize near other crops, says it plans to launch clinical trials of the corn in a few months."
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

Seven years later: "New Study Links Genetically Engineered Corn to Infertility"
http://www.organicconsumers.or...

Or maybe I've just watched too much "Star Gate: SG1"? :-)
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki...
"The Aschen's intentions were eventually uncovered when members of SG-1 unearthed the remains of what used to be a thriving urban civilization on the Volian world, learning that the Aschen's Anti-aging vaccine had the effect of sterilizing the entire population, after which they were wiped out."

Robots, Terrafoam, and contraceptives in the water is probably more reliable though, as Marshall Brain envisioned in "Manna":
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"I replied, "We could change it now. Robots are doing all the work. Human beings -- all human beings -- could now be on perpetual vacation. That's what bugs me. If society had been designed for it somehow, we could all be on vacation instead of on welfare. Everyone on the planet could be living in luxury. Instead, they are planning to kill us off. Did you hear that women were trying to drink the water out of the river? Some people think they're putting contraceptives in the water.""

That reflects and aspect of my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."

It may well be the case that there are always current limits. Perhaps everyone can't have their own private Caribbean island (yet, but maybe someday via SeaSteading or HoloDecks). There may always be some level of competition, including as young men and women struggle to show off for potential mates. But as a society we can shape how those competitive urges are directed to some extent, like James P. Hogan talked about in "Voyage from Yesteryear".

Still, there is a huge difference between people going hungry and being forced to take jobs they do not want versus people who can eat what they want and choose to spend their time how they want (subject to what other people are willing to do together with them). There may be many levels of abundance, but it seems that such a change in people being able to choose how to spend most of their waking hours without a direct need to earn money, such as via basic income, may be the biggest one.

And there may be dark sides to it too, like the potential for addiction, alienation, and isolation that can come with a wealth of material objects and personal space. Related items:
http://europepmc.org/articles/...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...

interesting read, even though I'm past the age where I think it's possible: Manna, by Marshall Brain.

"Mass surveillance is inevitable to any industrialized country. Which is why all countries with any technological sophistication have it. To think that one can 'fight' it to any real degree is like thinking one can 'fight' indoor plumbing or mass electrification."

Sad, but true. Still, political plays a role in the outcome of all this in terms of what sort of world we want to build together.

Recent posts by me to slashdot on that referencing other items:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

The bottom line -- read David Brin's "Transparent Society", read Theodore Sturgeon's 1952 "The Skills of Xanadu" about the meaning of privacy in a mobile networked world, read James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" and think about how we can transcend our society to some new healthier form. There are links to all those in my previous posts. It is so sad that with all this mindbogglingly powerful technology the main use we can think for it at first is to create artificial scarcity and kill each other with it. So sad. That is ultimately a moral issue requiring new ways of thinking, like Albert Einstein suggested after the development of atomic technology:
http://www.anwot.org/

We need to accept we have powerful technologies relative to classical human needs and rethink fundamental issues of our society accordingly, such as moving beyond artificial scarcity and moving towards a basic level of abundance for all (which would include more time for voluntary civic participation instead of endless overwork at mostly pointless activities related to preserving a scarcity-based status quo).
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Some humor by me on is at the end of this post, a parody of the "bunker scene", where this time Hitler confronts post-scarcity ideas:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

Any movement that relies on secrecy to succeed is pretty much a non-starter, even in times of less technology like the 1950s Civil Rights movement. The push for encryption against the government by technologists is similar to the argument that handguns will somehow stop government corruption or fascism. It is not going to work. What will work is broad social change done through democratic processes.
"What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change"
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

Or as I've said before: "As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go r

What you don't get, is if this succeeds, what is to prevent our employers from insisting that each of us wear it while we work? If your argument is that we will somehow restrict it to cops, what differentiates cops from other government employees (facing similar flak - either for not working full time, or inefficiency and such) Is raising the bar on cops worth it to lose this freedom? You may want to read this short story which has such a thing as its premise. http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

read up the short dystopic novel, "mensa" was the name IIRC

Manna. You're looking for Manna.

And its amusing because after the computer became responsible for micromanaging employees, the companies didn't need all those human managers anymore.

It seems like more people should take a read of Marshall Brain's Manna, a book about this very thing. (Online version).

It goes into what could happen (and given current economics, the rest of us are housed in tiny apartments to keep the away from the owners). And yet, it also details an alternative view where automation is NOT shunned, but instead used to fulfill what people originally dreamed them to do - do all the chores while the humans relax, or speculate, or invent, or do other things.

Quite an informative read if you have a couple of hours.

Not to dispute your insightful point in the short term, but taking this one step further, won't the "vigilantes" eventually also have their actions recorded? If so, presumably they would be subject to easy prosecution for assault, which presumably would be a deterrent or at least prevent it from happening repeatedly? That said, recordings could always be faked or erased I guess, so some sort of "cyber arms race" might continue at the community level.

See also Brin's Transparent Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

And the end of Marshall Brain's Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

I'm not saying I'm especially looking forward to such a future, but If universal surveillance is indeed where we are heading, at least we can try to make the best of it. A generalization on that I suggested three years ago:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulating equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

Complete story here:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future (also available on the Kindle) explores two different possible outcomes in a world with ubiquitous robots. Quite an interesting read.

This short story explores this concept as artfully as an Asimov story.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

There are two basic approaches to handle this:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Interesting point: "Good war is eliminating [the] ability for the bad guys to make war against you." Even though in practice, "War is a Racket": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

Of course, the justification for war, like the USA against Iraq as a so-called "preventive war" makes this a slippery slope. Millions of peopel are now dead or displaced and yet there were no WMDs in Iraq (the supposed justification for the Iraq invasion) and the USA has no obvious intention to pay reparations or fix all that was broken (as if that could even be done for all those dead or maimed or heartbroken). For example of how this logic can get more extreme, why not remove the potential for the "bad guys" to in thirty years be able to make war by striking now before they have created weapons or turned toward militaristic politics and become troublesome "bad guys"? Where do you draw the line (including on paranoia and fear-based planning)? Bombing Iran over fears of their future nuclear capacity falls somewhere along that line... What should be the rules and norms and policies for sentient creatures getting long given an apparent mix of cooperation and competition seemingly implicit in this universe?

Also what happens if, amplifying your suggestion, the entire planet (or solar system or galaxy or universe or metaverse) is defined as a no-go zone for human "civilians" for whatever reason? See the "Beserker" sci-fi series of military robots eventually fighting against all organic life anywhere...

There is a deep irony of creating all this advanced technology to in practice force other humans to act a certain way generally for reasons of material profit to some other humans, I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... 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. ..."

Alternatives include to use the robots to build solar power systems and a network of self-replicating space habitats and so on:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Most people's first experience with Glass won't be as a consumer item, but rather as something they use for work. Think construction workers, or people who work in hospitals or laboratories. Many people will be exposed to these via applications in the work environment. You, as a consumer, may not be very interested in Glass, but there are many businesses who want/need something like this for their workforce.

Yes, like the Burger-G fast food chain.

Too bad parent posted AC, because that short story is the absolute best futurist discussion of the topic.