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Looks like it's time for Joe Garcia to automate the first Burger-G as in the sci-fi short story Manna. The only question is... when will Google buy Australia? Or is that somebody else's problem?

On robotic trends and societal implications, see my post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3515335&cid=43077393

Or see my site for lots of ideas about the economics aspects of ongoing economic changes related to automation and increased productivity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Essentially, as I say on my site, there are five interwoven economies (or types of economic transactions -- subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and the balance between them changes along with technology and culture. Right now, we need to be talking about things like re-strengthening the subsistence, gift, and planned economies, while softening the exchange economy with a basic income. Because in a world full of cheap robotics, the exchange value of native human labor in the USA is not going to be that high. And otherwise theft increases as the moral bargain behind any particular economy is seen to break down -- and growing theft has its own huge costs and undesirable aspects.

Marshall Brain's site is great about the general topic of the economic implication of robotics (including wealth concentration):
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

Much better to have the Australia Project scenario in Manna - the entire nation essentially made into a cruise ship crewed by robots.

Some people love to create. I'm currently bored stiff, spinning my wheels at work, because I have no projects that interest me on my plate. I have some projects I'm *obsessed* with to the point of I wake up thinking about ways to implement them, but I'm not paid to do these things. I resent the idea of doing them in my spare time, because I won't receive any kind of reward for them - they'd probably just be ignored by my employer, but my employer would probably lay claim to it the instant it looked commercially successful.

That's all kind of fucked up. I know that my project has uses in many spheres. But it's actually got to the point now where my feelings of resentment to my employer are what I associate with it more than the interest in doing it. If I worked in a place like Valve (maybe not one which is games-oriented), I could get my idea out in the open and start enjoying my work again. Instead, I've taken a promotion to management, primarily because of frustration with the inability to get anything done - and discovered that it's pretty much the same in my new post as well. Now I have more money, but I still hate my job.

And it's pretty much the same for a lot of other people I know - they gave up. Because they can't get a job that they love that pays enough to keep a roof over their head. They can't even create such a job for themselves because they have financial responsibilities. And that's sad, especially in a society that's more productive per-person than EVER before. All the resources are going to the top, because that's what serves the people at the top best.

IMHO the human race has 3 possible futures - extinction at their own hand, a society which manages to get this stuff right and provide for people, whether they want to work or not, or a boot, stamping on a human face, forever. I really hope it's the middle path.

This is the question that nobody wants to answer.

Marshall Brain has thought about it. Manna seemed pretty far-fetched when I first read it, but lately it appears more prescient.

And that's what Marshall Brain's novella _Manna_ examines:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm "With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."

Some solutions I've cataloged: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
The most obvious is a "basic income" like they have some of in Alaska with the Alaskan Permanet Fund: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

It's kind of surprising how much politicians think they can get away with now in the USA. There is still massive unemployment and they think they can push through legislation like this. Why not instead, say, just mandate that all US companies be willing to pay for two months of employee training a year, to level the economic playing field and promote the growth of the US workforce? And also mandate vacation time as well?
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork ... Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"

Personally though, I'm all for throwing open the borders. The issue is making H1Bs second-class citizens. If you want to import workers, make them citizens when they step off the boat. And give everyone a basic income. It's an experiment, but its hard to imagine doing much worse than what we have.

What ever happend to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Why not ake the USA into the "Australia Project" Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm "With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."

Some solutions I've cataloged: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
The most obvious is a "basic income" like they have some of in Alaska with the Alaskan Permanet Fund: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

It's kind of surprising how much politicians think they can get away with now in the USA. There is still massive unemployment and they think they can push through legislation like this. Why not instead, say, just mandate that all US companies be willing to pay for two months of employee training a year, to level the economic playing field and promote the growth of the US workforce? And also mandate vacation time as well?
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork ... Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"

Personally though, I'm all for throwing open the borders. The issue is making H1Bs second-class citizens. If you want to import workers, make them citizens when they step off the boat. And give everyone a basic income. It's an experiment, but its hard to imagine doing much worse than what we have.

What ever happend to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Why not ake the USA into the "Australia Project" Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

You ain't seen nothing yet. There's a short story about where all this is going.. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm.. two models of the future in there, but I only find one plausible.

This short story explores some of the possibilities.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Got enough karma so might as well post this AC: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Captcha: exempt

Like in this story, a good read.

Time to reread Manna. The cooks, the manager, the cleaning staff, and finally you, until nobody has any work or any money.

Capitalism Supersized

The following suggestion at first seems impractical because it is so simple: What if we, as a society, simply give consumers money to spend in the economy? In other words: What if the way to achieve the strongest possible economy is to give every citizen more money to spend? For example, what if we gave every citizen of the United States $25,000 to spend? $25,000 sounds impossible the first time you hear it, but consider the possibility.

Would this simple step -- giving money to every consumer -- accomplish the five economic goals set forth in the previous section? Yes. It would be a huge boost to the American economy:

* The economy would be strong because of all of the consumer spending.

* The economy would be stable because income (and therefore spending) would be guaranteed.

* With $25,000 per year to spend, innovators would no longer be forced to work -- they could focus their energy on innovation, living off of the $25K per year they receive. Inventors would have time to invent, writers to write, entrepreneurs to breed new companies, etc. They could devote all of their time to innovation. There would be billions of dollars for people to invest, especially in their own businesses. And investors would have a stable marketplace into which to introduce new products.

Most importantly, it would create a nation where the citizens are truly free. If every person had $25,000 per year in today's dollars to spend, they would be able to live their lives even if they lost their jobs. If robots took their jobs it would not be catastrophic. People would be able to weather the robotic takeover, retrain and move into new careers.

The only question is when will the producers stop producing.

And the answer is never, because the proportion of people with the ability to do better that choose not to is vanishingly small.
This is what we know happens in the real world, not what some hypocritical loony thinks will happen in her sadistic fantasy world.
Try reading this if you want something with a more positive and morally agreeable outlook on the future.

It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/

While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.

Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.

The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/

Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/

And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).

The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s

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

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

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

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

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

I'm surprised we haven't seen a fully-automated fast food restaurant yet, for instance.

Not quite the same, but here you go: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Though I don't agree with some of his prognostications, Marshall Brain has some very interesting articles written regarding human labor and the coming Robot takeover.

The last time this topic came up, someone posted a link to the short story Manna. I found it well worth the read.

The story explores two vastly different ways of greeting a near-total automation of labour.

I would recommend reading some of the things Marshall Brain has written about this. He has(IMHO) the best take on this of any of the "futurists" I've read, including Kurzweil and the rest.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/

Schmidt is correct in saying that his livlihood, and that of Google and all other multi-national corporations is dependent upon customers. Customers who are well paid and well educated.

Will robotics and computers continue to take jobs away by "increasing productivity"? Will there be an unemployed segment of the population that will grow every year, regardless of what politicians do? I think so.

As the permanent underclass of unemployed grows and impacts corporate profits, it will be interesting to see what will happen. Large scale discontent will be largely controlled by the police state/security apparatus that we live in now already. No one will be able to make a difference and the 1% with all the toys will be able to live in a world completely removed from the reality that the rest endures. It is almost like this now.

Unless something like a massive coronal mass ejection happens, we can count on Schmidts, Brains and Joys assessments, that The Future Doesn't Need Us.

Story which examines this:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

William

I believe the short story you want is ``Manna 2.0'':

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

The other take I've seen on this is by howstuffworks.com 's Marshall Brain ; his ""Manna" short story portrays two visions of the future.

* One is a future what automation has taken over so many jobs that there is a large underclass of impoverished unemployed who are rounded up into social security camps, chemically sterilised, and guarded by robots.
* One is a future where automation has taken over so many jobs that everyone can have a basic income that ensure they can live "comfortably" doing whatever the hell they like - and the increasing efficiency of the technology means the level of comfort increases every year.

The privacy angle is that in the utopian version of all this, people voluntarily have implants that record and process all their sensory input, and AI agents watch to see if they are about to commit a violent action, and switch their motor neurones off to prevent them from doing it. I'm in two minds about this - on the one hand, I really don't like the idea of a machine watching me all the time, let alone able to paralyse me on demand. On the other hand, I would probably appreciate the sense of safety, and in a society where there are no unmet material needs, I'm guessing the pressure to commit violent crime would be virtually nil anyway. It relies on the proviso that the AI is both neutral and carefully monitored. If you concentrated this level of power in the hands of a dictator, you'd be screwed.

The natural trend with increasing technology in corporate hands is ubiquitous surveillance and enforcement of rules anyway - so you may as well pre-empt it and develop a system that serves us, instead of ruling us. If we just stick our fingers in our ears and ignore the problem, or stamp our feet and shout really hard that we don't like it, the technology is not going to go away.

Fictional look at this:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Combined with redefinition. Unemployment is low and dropping because labor force participation rate is dropping even faster. Eventually none of us will have jobs, but as we stand in the soup lines we'll see unemployment has dropped to merely 5% and good times are right around the corner.

You'll be fine as long as you keep listening to Manna's instructions or enjoy the good life in the Terrafoam housing.

Switzerland is a terrible example because it is a relatively small country with a large banking sector that essentially prospered in part by skimming a percentage off of huge global economic flows (including historically shielding transactions of dubious legality via their privacy laws). Such a pattern of success can't work that way for everyone, as nice a country as Switzerland may be in many respects..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland

The central issue regardless of what jobs people do is that so much wealth has become concentrated in so few hands. This has happened in big part because the value of automated capital managed by large bureaucratic systems with monopolies over markets is triumphing over the value of individual human labor. See Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" article for more details:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

You can't have a "service" economy when robotics and AI is better than most people for most tasks. You can't have a service economy when most things become manufactured so well they don't need much servicing or it is just cheaper to replace them with new things fresh from the automated factory.

That said, I feel that your other points on the US/Roman comparison are insightful.

What happens as the population grows but jobs dissapear?

People who flip burgers start to get nervous.

See near the end: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Or see my parable video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."

There's more stuff on other alternatives on my site.

Thansk for the insightful post.

Have a read of Manna, by Marshall Brain ( How Stuff Works founder). It predicts workers being managed by computers, then extrapolates the results. The results aren't pretty.

I just finished reading it. Nice dysopitan/utopian narrative, but there is a major point that was overlooked in my opinion.

This story shows us a future USA where all work is done by robots. Rich people get insanely rich, and poor people are all unemployed and are forced to stay in welfare centers that look like prison. The missing point is that such an economy would probably collapse if it tried to remain a capitalist economy.

With 99% of the population depending on welfare, then the market is almost destroyed. The riches cannot make profit anymore, as nobody can purchase anything. Making money by selling products abroad is not an option since other countries will also use robots, and therefore have a zero labor cost one cannot complete with. On the other hand, riches face taxes that are required to support the welfare system. Eventually they will move abroad to pay less taxes, making nation state to compete on lower taxes and lesser welfare. Once welfare system tends to zero, we have either the poor being exterminated, or we have them starting a revolution to break out of capitalism.

Now I wonder if the system can sustain itself with the poor being eradicated. Will the riches collaborate, or will they fight each other in order to make profit? If they do, then we recreate poor and we start over until there is only one rich person remaining. At that point the market does not exist anymore and capitalism destroyed itself.

This company offers poor people a chance to earn money, at a rate that the poor voluntarily accept.

You mean out of all their many options ? Wow ... that must be so great.

Meanwhile you forget the other side of the equation : you are forcing others to also accept the lowest rate. You are essentially locking Americans (and Europeans, and South Americans, hell, at these rates, even Middle Easterners and and and ...) out of large sectors of the economy, obviously giving them zero opportunities to replace the ones you've taken away.

There are these people, you may have met them, that do not have degrees, that do not have an Ivy League education ... and you are removing their options, reducing them to zero. After that, no doubt, you'll be telling me they're lazy and it's their own fault ... and hopefully at some point they'll show you that they're 98% of the population.

How is any of this "exploitation?"

Given the fact that that money will barely pay for living expenses in all but the most miserable locales their "choices" are reduced to nothing in practice. You get situations of workers building iphones who can't afford a single iphone after 12 months wages. You think that's somehow fair ?

Furthermore, that money will never pay, anywhere in the world, for decent medical care, for a decent car, for ... and so on and so forth. You're locking people out of the "western lifestyle" (you know the one you consider yourself entitled to).

And in places where this "standard of living" thing applies are hellholes like afghanistan or bad rural parts of China. If it applies in other places, that's temporary at best.

In short what is wrong with this : Manna

Bringing this concept home might not be so good either. Particularly if it goes like this.

There is one upside though. In theory it would eventually cut the unnecessary and wasteful cost overheads (like golden parachutes) associated with upper management. However since the least cost-effective personnel tend to make the decisions, it's unlikely to happen unless somebody starts a successful company with an AI as the CEO from the start.

Have a read of Manna, by Marshall Brain ( How Stuff Works founder). It predicts workers being managed by computers, then extrapolates the results. The results aren't pretty.

A story in which automated production far exceeds all demand; ramifications are investigated. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
    Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

However, schooling is certainly effective in keeping young people out of the work force. What most of the comments here seem to ignore is that 200 years ago, children at age 4 or 5 were working on farms and in mines and in factories. Now, with automation and electric motors, children are out of the work force generally until they turn 21 (or longer if they go to grad school). Things have changed so much, and many people posting here seem unaware of that. At this point, most work is "make work" related to guarding or pointless zero-sum competition.

I agree with your point about decision makers being out-of-touch with emerging technological realities. See my site for more on that.

And see also:
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
http://anwot.org/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Are you seriously telling me that some academics at Harvard telling politicians what they want to hear, (that "using killer robots like you are already doing works great") is a good thing? That academics advocating policies with obvious "blowback" potential is "solving a small problem" that "improves the world"?
http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Second-Edition-Consequences-American/dp/0805075593

When even people at the CIA are expressing doubts?
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LF05Df02.html
"Some United States Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in the agency's drone strikes program in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the program within the agency because it is helping al-Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.
"Some of the CIA operators are concerned that, because of its blowback effect, it is doing more harm than good," said Jeffrey
Addicott, former legal adviser to US Special Forces and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, in an interview with Inter Press Service (IPS).
Addicott said the CIA operatives that he knows have told him al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are effectively using the drone strikes to recruit more militants.
CIA officers "are very upset" with the drone strike policy, Addicott said. "They'll do what the boss says, but they view it as a harmful exercise. They say we're largely killing rank and file Pakistani Taliban, and they are the ones who are agitated by the campaign."
Because the drone strikes kill innocent civilians and bystanders along with leaders from far away, they "infuriate the Muslim male", said Addicott, thus making them more willing to join the movement. The men in Pakistan's tribal region "view Americans as cowards and weasels", he said. "

Have you ever given any thought to the implications of Harvard academics endorsing the ever wider use of killer robots to solve political problems? Including the political problems resulting from earlier use of killer robots by the USA? Where does it end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

So many things in our world are complex feedback loops. And yes, many academics actually study such complex things (especially in biology and ecology). But apparently it is too hard for those two guys at Harvard to google on "CIA drone blowback"?

I have collected plenty of fairly straight-forward alternative solutions. For example, a "basic income" which is supported by five Nobel prize winners in economics according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee#Advocates

I outline them on my website in various spots, including here (both positive and negative ones, in this case):
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Here is a book of alternatives collected by others:
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC

The issue is not whether solutions are simple or complex (witness the US tax code's complexity, or the complexity of all sorts of numerical models, including most recently one to simulate a bacterium posted recently on slashdot). The issue outline in "Disciplined Minds" is about putting on ideological blinders -- ones that may even prevent someone from seeing or advocating for simple solutions (like a basic

If you want to get an idea of what this looks like in practice, just look at Brazil. The rich live in heavily-secured opulence, the poor live in abysmal poverty.

. . . .but look at the OTHER end of the spectrum. Read Peter Diamandis' "Abundance". Or explore a abundance-based society (and the path to get there) in Marshall Brain's "Manna"

You may find this to be an interesting read - it's an SF story that explores two possibilities.

True, but you are glossing over an important political problem: just because the economy is productive enough to provide for the population with only half of working age population actually working does not mean that if half of the working age population works, then everyone will be provided for. Instead what we are seeing is that as productivity goes up, jobs are paid the same or less. You either need a major change in how much workers are paid for their jobs or you need something like social credit to provide for people who don't have jobs. Either one would be a huge political change, at least in the US. See Manna for what the alternative looks like (no one has to work because computers can do almost everything... so no one has jobs and nearly everyone is homeless).

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"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 one at a time.

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."

With nobody buying (being sacked, can't afford), what's the point of producing? Everything would be relatively too expensive no matter how absolutely cheap.

People have looked at both sides of this. A simplified view can be seen in Marshall Brain's story "Manna". A fairly decent look at two outcomes of such a society. . .

I don't bat an eye when I see that folks would rather choose welfare or unemployment benefits over indentured servitude. In fact, given the same situation, I believe I'd probably have to choose the same.

Makes you wonder if that will someday come to pass.

Ah, good sir! May I introduce you into an important work of science soon-to-be-not fiction? The story of Manna picks up at the end of this Slashdot article, apparently. Seriously though, it's an interesting and thought provoking read... and it's free.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

The real question is what do we do when it makes 90% of jobs unneeded?
I would love to think star trek, but dystopia is far more likely than utopia.

Here is a short story that explores that topic rather well.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

For personal health information there is no need to pump that information into a HUD that then displays it on your contact lens, a simple readout on a watch or phone would do.

The visual cues mentioned in this short story though would be very easy to do and rather useful.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna7.htm

"The world is full."

Carrying capacity is a function of technology and lifestyle (which are in turn functions of imagination and ethics):
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

The carrying capacity of the local solar system with known or easily forseeable technology is probably on the order of quadrillions of humans living in many millions of Earth's worth of space habitats.

See, to complement "Know Thyself", see also "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://www.anwot.org/

The big issue is we are trying to apply scarcity-based economic thinking to the technologies of abundance. So we demand that people work for the right to consume, but then we make them compete against firms introducing robots. This was a problem seen as far back as 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

A basic income, improved gift economy, better technologies for local subsistence, and internet-empowered planning at all levels could help increase our collective carrying capacity and quality of life.

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

"tl;dr"

Your loss. The Skills of Xanadu is an amazing story, especially for having been written in the 1950s. It inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext, which we are essentially using to communicate right now.

As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them. So, you can have "permaculture" without too much work. See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article?
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."

What would it take to convince you that robots can be used for mining, manufacturing, and for services if we truly wanted to do that at this point?
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005926.html
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

People for decades wanted to make agricultural robotics but were stymied by the economics of our society and its acceptance of cheap (slave wages) illegal labor. Give it a decade to adjust and we'll see robots in the Georgia and Alabama fields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2009/04/autonomous-grape-vine-pruner.html

Then you will see how software can be eaten. :-)

What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings? Robots can build new factories too (as if we did not have more than enough already). Don't confuse the fact that for historical reasons some few humans claim entitlement to "rent" on accessing resources they control socially with the issue that robots can increasingly supply substantially all the labor needed to use resources to make stuff. See Marshall Brain's Manna for one idea on how that might work economically:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm

And to see how robotic mining is emerging:
"Rio on edge of new world of robotic mining"
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6cc3482-6756-11df-a932-00144feab49a.html

That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff, especially when we are deciding for ourselves what to do or make. Look at how much people like Minecraft. So, it's not clear we need the robots in a big way. The alternative is to rethink the work so it is fun. How many trillions of one meter cubes have been mined over the last two years in Minecraft? People even pay for the privilege of doing so.

"tl;dr"

Your loss. The Skills of Xanadu is an amazing story, especially for having been written in the 1950s. It inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext, which we are essentially using to communicate right now.

As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them. So, you can have "permaculture" without too much work. See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article?
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."

What would it take to convince you that robots can be used for mining, manufacturing, and for services if we truly wanted to do that at this point?
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005926.html
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

People for decades wanted to make agricultural robotics but were stymied by the economics of our society and its acceptance of cheap (slave wages) illegal labor. Give it a decade to adjust and we'll see robots in the Georgia and Alabama fields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2009/04/autonomous-grape-vine-pruner.html

Then you will see how software can be eaten. :-)

What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings? Robots can build new factories too (as if we did not have more than enough already). Don't confuse the fact that for historical reasons some few humans claim entitlement to "rent" on accessing resources they control socially with the issue that robots can increasingly supply substantially all the labor needed to use resources to make stuff. See Marshall Brain's Manna for one idea on how that might work economically:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm

And to see how robotic mining is emerging:
"Rio on edge of new world of robotic mining"
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6cc3482-6756-11df-a932-00144feab49a.html

That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff, especially when we are deciding for ourselves what to do or make. Look at how much people like Minecraft. So, it's not clear we need the robots in a big way. The alternative is to rethink the work so it is fun. How many trillions of one meter cubes have been mined over the last two years in Minecraft? People even pay for the privilege of doing so.

"Why should we get rid of money?"

Mainly because it is increasing obsolete as a vague way to understand demand. Things like emails and twitters are a more nuanced way to express complex demands.

But, it is true, with a "basic income", money is not as bad a thing. For example, see Marshall Brain's Manna:
http://www.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." ...
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
"Let me show you." said Cynthia. She opened her catalog to a page, and pointed to one of the pictures. It was clothing. "This is what I am wearing." she said. "See - it is 6 credits. In a typical week I only spend about 70 or so credits on clothes. That's why I like to wear something new every day."
"The robots did manufacture Cynthia's outfit for free. They took recycled resources, added energy and robotic labor and created what she is wearing. It cost nothing to make it. She paid credits simply to keep track of how many resources she is using." "

More and more the link between a right to consume and a need to get humans to do labor is breaking. People could see that beginning even in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird peopleâ(TM)s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures --unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal i