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The short story manna http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm shows two societies post robot worker revoutlion; one thats very much distopian and one thats very utopian.

Raising children well can take about as much time as most adults can put into it. Our US society is currently suffering for too much parental time put into work and then other distractions. and not enough time spent with kids. The same goes for the effort reuired to maintain social relations with freidns and neighbors. That is historically way most human adults spent most of their time -- raising kids and being social. For reference on a hunter/gatherer lifestyle:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

I readily agree that people need a sense of "agency" -- that they are accomplishing things to make their life better. But whether that needs to be withing a structured system of economics we call "work" entailing bosses and customers and "wage slavery" is a different question (even if most of us practically have few other short-term alternatives to work).
http://www.whywork.org/

Related to you point, many people like playing a hunter/gatherer in an abundant Minecraft world a lot. Yet, maybe part of that is indeed because of the abundance and the possibilities? Yet, in US society, many people are arbitrarily shut out from all the abundance. This kind of stuff (or the need for it) is just wrong in such a wealthy society:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2009/08/07/6958/appalachian-fairgrounds-charity-tries-fill-gaps-health-care
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/22/demographic-shift-puts-american-dream-out-reach/

If "welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency", then:
A. Why do rich people tend to give their children lots of expensive things including Ivy League educations, good cars, condos, trust funds, and so on?
B. Would you turn down a million dollar cash gift?
C. Do monthly "Social Security" payments to any citizen in the USA over age 65 cause enormous distress to the elderly?

If you think about these three questions, you may find a missing piece of the puzzle of a picture of the future.

However, your point about the cost of living going down is indeed true and needs to be kept in mind. On the other hand, decreasing costs also generally implies less money going to fewer people. But the marketplace only "hears" the needs of those with cash. If you have zero money, then you can't afford a place to sleep or put your stuff. And further, automation tends to concentrate wealth (at least initially).
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

Productivity has doubled or triples over the last few decades in the USA, but real wages for most workers have remained flat (granted, health insurance benefits have increased, but it is not clear people are that much healthier for that). That is a political issue about fairness as well as power.

I'd agree humans want interaction with other humans (generally), but whether that is best in the context of payments (as opposed to gifts or family and friend interactions) is another question. For example, I prefer to have my wife cut my hair than to go to a barber or hair salon.

Another thing to consider is that perhaps all humans have some claim on some of the fruits of the commons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

BTW, on NYC homeless:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/28/131028fa_fact_frazier?currentPage=all

It sounds there like the "means testing" and uncertainty and constant changes create much

Wow, looking that up, on Applebees and Chili's: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-waiters-and-waitresses/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/12/02/applebees-tablets-table-top-devices-restaurant-technology/3698561/

I think people overestimate the "human touch" need in service (like mentioned as a reason everything won't be automated in other posts). While it is true humans need other humans to be human, and physical human touch is important, interactions with "strangers" can be stressful for many, and they also expose people to a risk of disease. And example if banking, where many people now prefer using an ATM machine to talking to a bank teller. Same with many automated phone systems for routine transactions. It may depend in part on a person's personality of course. At some point thought, "more sanitary" and "more personalized and interactive" may become arguments for more automation. For example, who likes to wait around for the wait staff to bring you a bill when you are ready to go at the end of a dinner out?

One can hope though that as we see more abundance from more automation, people may have more time to cook at home and entertain at home. That may be the bigger long term change here. Why go to a restaurant at all, where you have little control over the ingredients, the people around you, and so on? Or, alternatively, when a robot can fetch your meal for you, as in this video of a PR2 robot going to Subway to fetch a sandwich:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp

Marshall Brain's "Manna" explores two possible answers to your last question.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Regarding "socialism", here is a great graph on US perceptions, preferences, and reality regarding wealth distribution:http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/
"As you can see from the figure, participants rather badly estimated the current state of wealth disparity! Furthermore, they offered an ideal wealth distribution (under a "veil of ignorance") that was even more different (and more equal) relative to the current state of affairs.
What this tells me is that Americans don't understand the extent of disparity in the US, and that they (we) desire a more equitable society. It is also interesting to note that the differences between people who make more money and less money, republicans and democrats, men and women -- were relatively small in magnitude, and that in general people who fall into these different categories seem to agree about the ideal wealth distribution under the veil of ignorance.
Maybe this suggests that when there are no labels, and we think about the core of our morality in abstract terms (and under the veil of ignorance), we are actually very similar?"

Graph picture there seems broken; see it here:
http://ecologicalsociology.blogspot.com/2012/06/us-income-inequality-real-perceived.html

Still, you are right about the "allergy", and that is why planning through the market in the USA along with a basic income may be the easiest way forward:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_market.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/establish-basic-income-guarantee-all-americans-similar-what-being-proposed-switzerland/jF

Time to take your blinders off Marie.

You must have missed the story of the Walmart that is holding a food drive for the benefit of it's employees. Or the stories that food banks are stretched thin.

I guess you'll be a major employer soon. Those unsightly and inconvenient poor people won't chuck themselves into the trash compacter.

What has changed is that we are learning how to replace human labor with machines at a growing pace. For the first time in the U.S. future generations are forecast to be less well off than their parents were. The extremely wealthy have gotten better than ever at keeping their table scraps from reaching the masses below.

As for your other bald assertions, no. Not really. The inequality of wealth has waxed and waned throughout history. Generally it steadily increases until a bloody revolution levels the playing field. Wouldn't it be nice to skip the bloody evolution for a change?

The xboxes are cheap, but a house to keep it in is not. The table is cheap but not the food to put on it. Meanwhile, McDonald's padlocks it's dumpsters to make sure they don't accidentally feed a homeless person for free.

Read Manna. It's a bit fanciful, but the underlying reasoning is sound.

I actually interviewed for a position at Amazon HQ in Seattle that worked on the software that "guides" the warehouse workers through the maze. I can't disclose details, but it sounded an awful lot like the story that has been posted several times here already: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

PD: I didn't get the position and, looking back at it, I'm glad

Yes, that was my first thought when reading the article.

And since you did not provide a link here is one for people wondering what we are talking about.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

just started reading from that link and then I found this paragraph in the story:

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.

Yes, that was my first thought when reading the article.

And since you did not provide a link here is one for people wondering what we are talking about.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Well, in theory, in a truly free market, that is not supposed to happen, as individual capitalists get lazy or sick and others take their place. And without things like copyright, patents, limited-liability corporations, or other monopolies or subsidies or preferences granted and enforced by a strong State, it is hard to hold onto a top position.

Yet, there are positive externalities like community and negative extenalities like pollution that lead to market failures without some sort of higher level organization than a marketplace. And, it takes money to make money, so wealth builds on wealth. And in practice, great wealth means you can buy favorable laws. That is, until the populace resists in some way, including at the voting booth. Or until the system collapses from some unaccounted for externality like an unmanaged unregulated risk leading to market failure or widespread disaster like biotech plague or nanotech gray goo or failed asteroid mining project crashing to Earth or corporate-lobbied-for militaristic spending spirals out of control and saturates the world with mobile mines etc..

Anyway, what you describe is a bt like the first part of Marshall Brain's "Manna" novel.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

It's true in a sense that most people don't want to work, because at the core of all animal nature is a motivational triad of seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy. Doug Lisle talks about this (including in the book, The Pleasure Trap).
"The pleasure trap: Douglas Lisle"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX2btaDOBK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxf4kj8Rb6Y

In the past, people who were not "lazy" wasted energy and so did not survive as well. The question is, what is the payoff for doing something in gaining pleasure or avoiding pain (or also at higher moral or spiritual or social levels etc.). I think most people are willing to do things when they see a payoff (even just trundling over to the fridge for a beer). More on motivation by Dan Pink:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

And people seem tuned for a certain small amount of self-directed work daily (plus child-care):
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours"

This seems more plausible

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

We are warehoused. Then eventually someone will figure out hey the machines do all the work anyway I will share a robot with them.

However there *will* be an overlap. keep this broken system we call capitalism? people who spout this off have not bothered to look at the current state of things. As in 'we are not there yet'.

The in between time will be awful.

There's some speculative fiction called Manna by Marshall Brain over just this.

It's a good story and describes exactly what happens - the rich control everything, while everyone else is on "welfare" and stuffed into overcrowded apartments and provided food. They're not allowed to leave and explore - just hang around.

I won't spoil the ending - it's a good read and it shows one possible way to have robots provide us with what we need.

In short, it's not about letting machines control US, but having us control machines. So far, they're controlling us looking at the crowd who cannot get away from their smartphones and such.

Read Manna if you want a likely idea of how this will end up. But probably without the upside of The Australia Project.

the latter part sounds like the beginning on "manna" - computer system in a short story somebody linked to in ./ recently.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

creepy.

>Or will you pass a law against that, too?

No, eventually you make all the businesses pay huge amounts in taxes for using robots to support social welfare, unless you want to end up in a Manna world. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Unless of course, you want millions of unemployed hungry people to riot and burn your infrastructure down.

seems like a really great idea until robots tap into your spinal implant and force you to obey Rule #7: Obey The Rules

I'll just leave this here: a beautiful dream.

Mars, here we come! There's no where here that's fit for human habitation.

Now the only problem that needs to be solved: how to git 'er done without a century of bloodshed. O, Marx, you bastard. Must it always end in violence?

Good thoughts.

" In my opinion the most important role of a manager is to enable communication between his team and for him to communicate current information to people himself. This current information is not alway easy to communicate in a large group. "

I've worked in the corporate/business world for over 30 years and in all that time, I've found that what you described above to be the exception, not the norm. I'll openly admit I am somewhat jaded after all this time working for companies and management that fail to see the talent they have, the piss poor way the manage that talent, and the indiscriminate way talented people are discarded, because they don't fit some "model" of approach to work. (oaky, maybe really jaded).

Still, you got me to look at this a little more and I come back with a less then comfortable view of gamification. I found this one definition from gamification.com

Gamification is a business strategy which applies game design techniques to non-game experiences to drive user behavior.

I consider myself a rather intelligent person and that sentence makes little sense other then the the last phrase, "drive user behavior". No warm fussy from that. So I look a little more and find this viewpoint "and thousands more are using gamification to drive key business metrics." and then there is this "The aggregated data on the performance of each player will make promotions, bonuses and layoffs more transparent and fair. This will have the effect to undermine the power of a manager."

Having just finished reading an fascinating story called "Manna" I could not help but see parallels in the application of this new paradigm. Now my performance is monitored on a constant basis (what happens when I have a bad day?) and I wind up in an open competition with fellow employees for resources or raises. I'm not against competition, I compete in Eventing, but it is a style of competition that suits me much more then other type of score keeping activities. What i see in gamification is openly pitting employees against each other. As this is about work, not fun and games it becomes much more serious.

Personally I do not see something like gamification as a good thing for employees, but it is one for top level executives and owners. Sure, I can (and did) go to a place where my talents are appreciated without the micro-management normally found. My concern would be, what happens when those places become less and less. Somehow, when big business thinks something like this si really good, it does not bode well for the rest of the working population. (but again, I'm jaded and at this point in my life I'd rather work/own an equestrian center then program).

I've been very interested in this subject for quite some time and have done some number crunching on employment rates in different sectors (as determined by our national statistics agency). Practically of them are in decline except for these five:
- Catering
- IT
- Security
- Medical and other care
- Sport and recreation

(and to a certain extent waste management/recycling)

Jobs in these sectors have been growing steadily for the past 40 years. I think we can expect that trend to continue; these are exactly the jobs that are not easily automated. The others will slowly be taken over by the machines. This in itself is not a problem, though. The problem lies not in automation, humans will find new things to do. There is a problem though, and that's that as humans are replaced by machines, the money earned by these machines will be "trapped" within businesses. Without employees, there's no salary to pay and there will be no mechanism to keep the money going around. Economy will slow down, possibly come to a standstill. And this may very well be exactly what we've been experiencing the past few years (albeit partly caused by outsourcing to China instead of automation - for now).

There are several "solutions". The obvious one would be huge taxes and welfare. However, as stuff becomes automated really quickly, nearly everything businesses currently do will become commodity rather quickly. On the one hand this means everybody can do them, on the other hand it means nobody will be able to excel in them nor will any new business be able to enter such markets. Due to this, probably not too many businesses will remain. And when that happens, we will end up in some kind of planned economy. If we smart and/or lucky, that is; the alternative would probably be some kind of dystopian oligarchy of the owners of the machines.

Marshall Brain wrote quite a nice story about exactly this situation, its problems and the possible solutions. For a story it's rather bad, but it provides so many insights into the intricacies of this problem that it's definitely worth a read.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Your post is one of the best I've read on here, and your logic on how to rectify this situation is right on the money.

However, sometime I like to take the role of the Devils Advocate, and now is such a time...

For starters, lets look at the Distribution of Wealth in the world, and in the U.S. in particular. We all know where this has been going in the last 20-30 years. It is much worse now than at anytime since I think the 1920's, maybe longer. For lack of better phrase, "The 1%" are no dummies, and when it comes to ruthlessly marginalizing the vast majority of the human race, they have done an expert job of it. They will never agree to any sort of system that doesn't keep them where they are, whether that means putting billions of people out of work or not. If they can design a system, using robotics at it's core and technology as it's foundation, they will continue to live their lifestyle at the expense of the rest of humanity. They are only "keeping us around" in the meantime until the day arrives when sufficient technology is in place(robotics, omniscient surveillance, etc;) for them to truly take over and live in a world without the billions that are below them, and, for now, an annoyance.

As much as I hope a scenario like that doesn't play out, I see the proof of it on a daily basis.

I would highly recommend Marshall Brain on this subject.

Might it be Manna by Marshall Brain?

Got there by searching post-scarcity Australia, which got me to the wikipedia article on Post-scarcity economy, which mentions the "Australia Project" from that novel.

You can read it on his site.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Manna

The other thing to consider is that we're rapidly heading towards a sci-fi dystopian future where human labor is no longer as important as it is now. When the unemployment rate shoots up to 85%, wouldn't you rather fill their free time with something other than random crime sprees? Yes, it sounds very "Brave New World"-ish, but it's rapidly coming true. Unless society just drops the use of labor and money as measures of productivity, which will never happen, this is the inevitable future!

For your reading enjoyment!

People always complain that the march of technology will put people out of jobs, historically this has always been proven false.

The issue here is one of similar contexts. If the current situation is the same as all the historical situations, then we can expect the same results. This is simple expectation learning from historical examples.

I claim that the context is different this time. Looking at GDP per capita, we see the aggregate purchasing power is higher than the level needed for everyone to survive.

Standard economic theory builds on the premise of infinite consumption, which comes from the assumptions of infinite population growth and infinite personal consumption.

Infinite population growth is observed to be false. Population is decreasing in most industrialized nations, and US population would be decreasing if it were not for immigration. Even with immigration, the growth rate is almost negative right now and is expected to be negative very soon.

Infinite individual consumption is also observed to be false on the average. When people reach a certain level of comfort, their needs are met and they have no need to consume ever more resources. Individuals won't eat an infinite amount of food if given the chance, won't use an infinite amount of electricity, or buy an infinitely large house. Once their needs are met, consumption levels off.

The upshot is that we have either reached, or are very close to, the level where all production can be satisfied by fewer workers than exist in the population.

This is the difference, this is how the context has changed from the Luddites in the early 1800's. In all previous examples, there was enough demand for production that people could find work in other areas. This time it's different.

We have an ever-growing number of people who are no longer needed to work.

OK, a reasonable point, but what do you suggest? Stop economic progress, the growth in productivity (if we could)? Should we have stopped in 1950? 1920? How would you and I be communicating?

Here's a well-written example of a possible alternate system.

Check it out - it's an easy read, and gives a good introduction from which we can have informed discussion.

To summarize that position, let's take the current economic growth to it's logical conclusion. Imagine a large factory sitting in Arizona which is responsible for producing all consumables needed by the population. It's completely self contained: solar powered, part of its production is diverted to producing replacement solar panels as they wear out. It recycles waste into new products. It's so completely automated that the number of people needed to run the place is negligible.

Everyone in the US is assigned a fixed portion of the factory output in the form of a monthly allowance - say, $1000 worth of production. Each month people order what they need, the factory makes it and has it delivered to the doorstep. 'Sort of like online grocery shopping.

There is no physical reason preventing such a plant; furthermore, there is no physical reason why the plant couldn't divert some of it's production to duplicating itself, so that over time production would double, and then double again.

This is a nice model with no logical inconsistencies that anyone can see, and it's predicted to be the endpoint of our economic development.

No one knows how we transition from the current system to the global factory model yet.

Good points, along the lines of books like "Brave New World" and "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Although it seems lots of systems link together to support power, so there is probably not just one, even if one may be stronger at one time.

The movie "Elysium" features security robots, for example. I envisioned something related here with robots enforcing the "rules":
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

Marshall Brain talks about robots enforcing things in "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

But right now, the laws the human police (and legal bureaucracies) enforce are created through political means:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica
"Q: So, who does rule America?
A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., the owners of corporations, banks, other financial institutions, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire. ...
Q: Then how do they rule?
A: That's a complicated story, but the short answer is through lobbying, open and direct involvement in general policy planning on the big issues, participation (in large part through campaign donations) in political campaigns and elections, and through appointments to key decision-making positions in government."

That said, perhaps the world will always be run by the "1%" who are paying attention in any community? Even those who showed up at "Occupy Wall Street" were, in a sense, part of a "1%"?

OWS's "We are the 99%" was actually a divisive slogan. A focus on increasing egalitarianism might have been better:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe the main issue is whether those who are paying attention have an egalitarian mindset to some degree, at least as far as distributing most of what nature and industry produces? If you look at Western Europe, there is a somewhat different sense of political and moral accountability among leadership. Granted, that is driven by a more active and aware populace building upon ideas from the USA's past:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010
" How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? ... The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."

Thus:
"How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/
"In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germanyâ(TM)s big three car companies --- BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen -- are very profitable."

That comes down somewhat to culture and mythology and the stories we (including the "1%") tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be (and why).

Montly "Social Security" payments from birth: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Also, to echo your point on "family", raising children well can easily take as much effort as most adults can put into it... And the solar system could support quadrillions of humans in high-tech style in space habitats.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Manna, by Marshall Brain. The article description is kind of a point-in-time description, but this story gives a good idea of a couple possible futures for increased robot involvement in businesses.

But this seems inevitable, and needs to be solved by changing the attitudes of society toward education rather than by hamstringing technological progress.

Inevitable...? No shit, eh?
Where do we see any technology being hamstrung?

The reality is, with the increase in "productivity" due to technological "progress", less and less people in the U.S. are employed, or employed enough to support themselves or their families.
Ever heard of the jobless recovery?

Driverless cars will become a reality.
Machines that pick produce will become a reality.
Robotic police and security forces will become a reality.

And a large and ever growing percentage of the American population will become unemployed/underemployed.
What will these people do all day?
How will they feed themselves and their families?
What is the future of the US with a large percentage of the population leading lives like that?

I would recommend reading some of Marshall Brains thoughts on these topics.

Read Manna by Marshall Brain. It's an interesting view of two potential post-labor robot-driven economies. I hope we end up in the robot-driven paradise instead of the everyone-on-welfare dystopia, but I'm not convinced we will. I'm crossing my fingers for a Star Trek economy in my lifetime.

(Of course, given that we're looking perhaps a bit beyond 30 years in the future, it'll probably look very similar to today in a lot of ways with some changes that nobody predicted.)

We had an "easy" introduction to automation with the auto industry in, what, the '70s and '80s on, with hundreds of thousands of workers displaced. Some found other work. A significant number became chronically unemployed and unemployable.

Varies by whose estimates you go by, but gentlest case I've seen is 1/3 of working population in U.S. jobless by mid-century. As in no work to be had at all.

See http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm for a version.

That would be how Manna ended: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

You and the movie just demonstrated the two different philosophies of "ownership" of prosperity that will decide human fate in the next century...

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

available here:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

See Marshall Brain's Manna for an example about "free":
http://marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
----
"It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
    "If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
    Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea -- everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, he believed that every human being should get an equal share of all of these free products that the robots are producing. He took the American phrase 'all men are created equal' quite literally."
-----

Attempts I've made (not very successfully) to help bring something like that about include:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

A "basic income" (social security for all from birth) would be a way to do something in the "Manna" direction right away in the USA, where say, half the GDP would be distributed evenly among residents and half would be earned by those who chose to work.

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

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. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
    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.
    So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially ... irony. :-)"

And your point about the irony of how our fear of Skynet will lead to us building it preemptively is a great example of this general theme. It would be not much to worry about except that these technologies are so powerful -- which means we don't have to fight over material resources... See Marshall Brain's Manna at the end for another vision of what might be possible if we build a different sort of infrastructure with these technologies.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

That said, people may always find ways to compete to show off for status. So, we as a global society need to redirect those urges into more productive (or less destructive) areas...
"Evolution for competition & cooperation"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3866253&cid=44019221

"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)"
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 [slashdot.org]
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality. ..."

The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now.

Like your idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

And for related ironic humor in the news: :-)
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/06/14/rep-stockman-requests-nsa-logs-for-phone-traffic-between-white-house-irs/

An example in fiction of a Transparent Society is in Marshall Brain's "Manna" at the end:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

My suggestion a couple years ago to a public call for ideas by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

And I also wrote:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"So, with all the billions of dollars a years spent on âoeintelligenceâ, why not at least try to produce some freely-available âoedual useâ intelligence tools to help civilian American citizens make sense of the real things that are killing most real Americans by the hundreds of thousands every year?"

My wife and I have worked on some software used by the intelligence community in different countries. But our focus had been to try to help decision makers see issues from multiple perspectives. Note the Snowden here is a different Snowden from the leaker:
http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/4318/un-wired/
"There had been two DARPA projects, working off two very different philosophies. One (TIA) sought to obtain and search all possible data to detect the possibility of terrorist events. That raised civil liberties concerns and much controversy in the USA leading to resignations and programme closure. A parallel program Genoa II took a very different philosophy, based on understanding nuanced narrative supporting the cognitive processes of decision makers and increasing the number of cultural and political perspectives available to policy makers. I was a part of that program, and proud to be so. It also forms the basis of our work for RAHS and contains neither the approach, not the philosophy of TIA."

We tried to get the related company to open source the software, but not much luck. My wife does have some rights to some of the work, plus the core ideas are available in the public literature (which is what my wife based her research on).

We all may well benefit from an expectation of privacy, and a healthy government may well have an obligation to defend privacy the same way it might defend our physical infrastructure. I don't want to argue against those things (even if in practice in the communal extended-family villages that hunter/gatherer humans had historically, privacy may have been rare). But in practice right now, I doubt we can stop the spying, because it is too seductive, an

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

That was Steve Jobs' original vision at NeXT --- a fully-automated factory where raw materials came in one end and finished computers the other. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/24/business/all-next-inc-s-plant-lacks-is-orders.html

The problem of course is how to sustain people who aren't / can't work. For a pessimistic view on this look at Manny by Marshall Brain: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

That's some tasty thinking, man. One key thing is future cost of energy. If energy is cheap enough ("too cheap to be metered" as some of the early blurbs for nuclear power had it) then those not in the intellectual one-percent will be able to make what they need for the most part. Our whole thinking and doing about one's station and worth in life along with the entire economic system and its rationale while have to change radically. It will be a [ahem] paradigm shift. Much of the basic thinking on this has been kicking around for years, it's just that few do think on it and fewer take it seriously. Those who read widely in science fiction will have had at least some exposure to bits and pieces of it.

For an interesting take, see http://marshallbrain.com/ and click on "Manna" - it's a quick read and covers some of the ground.

OSS as human future is one thought-provoking....er, thought. Thanks for that.

This appears to be a story depicting a sort-of utopian future (of limited extent - an island) where there are no rules.

I'm not sure from the context whether the author is in favor or against the concept. It somehow feels like he is knitting together several uncomfortable consequences of "no rules" in an attempt to paint that future as dystopian.

The thing people always miss, the important overlooked point, is that no one wants a state where there are no rules. What people invariably want is a state which has rules enforcing human rights, and little else.

The most basic human right is to have sovereignty over ones own body. Mat Honan's article shows us that with no rules, outsiders would be able to do anything they wanted to us - even against our consent. It would be the strong doing whatever they wanted to the weak. Typical, obvious, and predictable - we have many examples of lawless societies where the strong do just that.

Many of our rules are violations of that first most basic right, pretty much anything that someone else thinks that you should do or not-do for your own good: rules about drugs, prostitution, abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, and yes, wearing clothes. We could do away with large swaths of the legal landscape and eliminate large parts of government, both local and federal, if we could just say "do anything you want, so long as you don't infringe on the rights of others".

If you would like to read about a rule-less society which enforces basic human rights and is a little less dystopian, try "Manna" by Marshall Brain. It's an easy read and an interesting story.

Another good example is "Voyage From Yesteryear" by James Hogan. A little longer and with more drama, but essentially a rule-less society which enforces basic human rights.

Marshall Brain was onto this about a decade ago.

Manna is an interesting short story on the topic:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

In U.S. society, as people who can't compete with automation become non-employable, they are forced to live on welfare in government housing that is essentially a prison camp. There is little opportunity for social mobility.

In the same short story, Australia redefines their economy to be more of an entitlement society, where people have equal access to education, vacation, etc. It becomes more of the utopia that was envisioned in the early 20th century with technology truly making life easy.

I enjoyed this short story, because it demonstrates how the U.S. population could gradually become dependent on a massive welfare state with the standards of living becoming very meager, while societies that are willing to reinvent their economy may thrive.

Or not. The following short story presents a picture where, instead of being slaves to robots, we may enslave them instead.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Now where did I read about robotic supervisors before?

Yeah, I've read this story before.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I believe the science fiction story you want is:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Yes, and we should be planning for that now! Our path out of any technological singularity may have a lot to do with our path into it, and that path includes our politics and socio-economics. Are we going to wait twenty years until most human labor has little value even in most service industries?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Other thing we can do beyond a basic income include expanding our gift economy, improving democratic participatory planning at all levels of government, and improving tools for local subsistence (like gardening robots and cheap solar panels).

I agree that not everything can be framed in terms of profit, and besides, there's such a thing as market failure, so in certain cases we certainly need government funds and/or oversight.

By the way, there's a nice short story describing your scenario, where robots and AI increasingly replace humans at work. Marx' old question suddenly becomes relevant: who owns the means of production? A few megacorps employing the few last workers and supplying the rest of the redundant population with decent (but basic) food, shelter and entertainment (in exchange for taking contraceptives, perhaps)... or are the means of production and the proceeds owned collectively, with each citizen just doing whatever they please.