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http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17, 2010. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history. ..."

That would be Manna.

You are thinking of the story Manna by Marshall Brain.

the hospital scene where they do the diagnosis with wands?
medical zebras do exist.....

this will allow for the supplantation of medical professionals with machines..

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

The people who create goods should expect to feed their families, this isn't the result of a "money-obsessed, money-worshiping society".

No, actually, the people who have families should expect to feed their families, just because they're human beings and are already doing a productive and difficult job: bringing new humans into the world and educating them. So they should get a family-raising allowance from the productive labour of others just because they're helping the human race.

And in fact, the productive labour should really be done by robots, rather than people, because that's more efficient. And once it is, it will be obvious that there's no necessary moral or logical connection between who does the work, and who gets the goods, because robots aren't going to need high pay, and if a robot replaces a human's job, that human shouldn't starve.

But thinking too deeply about this leads to the realisation that worshiping money IS wrong, and that the Communist slogan of "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs" is, in fact, morally just (even if the means taken by the Bolsheviks to try to create such a state were self-defeating).

And that's just un-American.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Multiple, blatant logical and factual errors aside, this guy is effective at conveying the spirit of what's happening here. Ignore the utopia at the end, please (it's a structure that lends itself to being manipulated by demagogues), but the general premise of it is sound and compelling enough to be used despite the obvious errors.

I personally am studying for a field of work that will lead to my being replaced by a small shell script^W^W^W^W an AI algorithm within the next few decades, once AIs get convincing natural language processing algorithms. Which is fine with me, provided that someone takes care of the "we will all be on welfare at the end of this" problem.

I don't think anyone's taking care of that problem yet.

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

Obligatory Marshall Brain (founder of howstuffworks.com) essay on what will happen when (almost) everything's automated: Mass joblessness? Guaranteed income?

http://www.marshallbrain.com/robots-in-2015.htm

Their balance depends on culture and technology:
* Subsistence
* Gift
* Planned
* Exchange
* Theft/Parasitism

So, as Moore's Law comes to an end, having moved up and S-curve, we could see a shift between these types of economies. The exact balance somewhere would depend on the culture.

See also Marshall Brain's on-line book "Manna" for some ideas of, say, a basic income might look like.

Related:
  http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
  http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I suspected a model like this would be the logical conclusion of the way Capitalism is currently going when I read this. Indeed, with the wealthiest at the very top refusing to budge an inch as they gain and cling to more and more of the wealth, who will be able to buy and spend except them?

The Concentration of Wealth
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

You are not the only one thinking on those lines.

Marshall Brain once wrote quite an entertaining story about this phenomenon. I think it might be spot on (until it goes crackpot, that is:P).

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I'm not saying it's shit, I'm just pointing out that it's not what it looks like to the casual observer. I'm definitely not saying that they shouldn't do this, just pointing out that making it lifelike isn't actually going to make it more of a robot, but it might change how people react to it, which is exactly what they want to find out.

Also, where do you get the idea that I have some final destination in mind? Should we even build robots that look lifelike? I don't think the details of the exterior are that important, hence my criticism.

But speaking of the future with advanced robots, I think it would be very useful to build robots that can control themselves reliably in order to perform complicated tasks, since then we could use them for all kinds of dangerous jobs and save a lot of lives, or even to take over almost all human labor, and give almost everybody a life of leisure. But that would require a radical remodelling of the economy, or else the rich people would literally own the labor force. Bad things might happen otherwise. (The story is a bit cheesy, but does explain the kinds of things I worry about.) We'd probably need a kind of "Robo-Communism", in which the fruits of the labor of the nonsentient robots (who do all the work that doesn't strictly require a conscious mind) are shared by everyone, and not owned by the rich, which would leave the non-rich to starve without jobs.

But thanks for calling me a small-minded asshole, I needed that.

Interesting short story by Marshall Brain on this:

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

Wishful thinking, but society, as a whole does need to face the fact that there will be less work needed to support people in the future.

William

Yes, I agree, and your example is something to think about.

Marshall Brain wrote some about this in "Manna", but ultimately people were more passive there, and there were also a lot of police robots to enforce "the law" related to mainstream economics:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

As I see it, the economy has always been a mix of four types (subsistence economy, gift economy, planned economy, and exchange economy). Even in the USA right now, we still have all four types (examples: Gardening, Debian, Roads, Walmart). But the balance can shift, and we can also put in place things like a basic income to intentionally shift the balance. Between what is spent on education and what is spent on social security, the USA already spends about US$800 per month per person on social programs. If that money just went directly to each person (or their parents for kids), then that would be a basic income at no increase in taxes (and likewise, universal health coverage would be possible based on just what is spent now by the US government for health care if done similar to other industrialized countries). Now, seniors who currently get more that US$800 per month would be worse off financially in that sense, however, they would be living in a world where their children and neighbors would suddenly have a lot more free time, which might be a very good thing for their health and happiness. Plus, to keep their benefits at current levels (an extra three hundred dollars a month or so?) would probably just require a relatively small change in taxes, probably not more that our current war spending.

However, even as $800 a month per person is just enough to live on in the USA (when coupled with medical coverage), I think it might make more sense to devote at least half the US GDP to a basic income (which leaves the level of the GDP from around 1997 to motivate people to work, and it was enough back then) and that level would be more like US$2000 per month.

But, as we get better 3D printers and they eventually can print solar cells and more 3D printers (as well as tools to recycle materials or collect them from nature), we will see a diminishing need for exchange for material things acquired by exchange, so a basic income would become less important except about control of land. Likewise, in countries that plan better, they could create an infrastructure of hostels or universities that people wanted to spend time around. And as the gift economy expands in the digital realm, there is less need to pay for digital files, and as abundance spreads, there are more people with extra things to give away (like old cell phones), again reducing the need to buy things.

So, there is a very complex dynamics going on that relates to production and consumption of stuff, but it is, for the most part, totally ignored by mainstream economists lost in the beauty of their elegantly beautiful but woefully incomplete and even sometimes deadly equations.

Why hasn't it occurred? Because powerful computing hardware has never been so cheap and abundant. That is the new, disruptive change. It still growing by leaps and bounds. You can already buy cards with 64 cores running linux and put them in your PC or robot. Mobile devices are already going multicore. Distributed machine learning is already a reality. Those things did not exist before. and that is why there hasn't been 50% unemployment due directly to automation. Forget Asimov and Bradbury, they did not foresee it. Try Marshall Brain instead.

Even China is automating to cut costs: http://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. China, once considered one of the lowest-cost automotive producers because of its supply of cheap labor, is becoming another example of rising expectations as workers demand their share of the country's growing industrial prosperity."

It is the fiscal logic of mainstream capitalism in its final death spiral...

What's going to happen when a billion+ Chinese get a taste of prosperity and then lose their jobs to machine? Judging by the USA, not much... The unemployed will just suffer and die I guess... Is that the "hopeful" end to all this? Can't we hope for something better? There are other options for progressive change as I outlined, but here is a sci-fi story by Marshall Brain about two of them, suffer and die vs. a basic income as a right of citizenship:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Also, people like to do a lot of jobs like raise good food, but our society and its economic model won't allow them (or at least makes it really hard) because the quality of the actual work experience itself is discounted:
    http://www.californiadreamseries.org/rfc.htm
    http://www.hulu.com/ripe-for-change

There was no net job growth in the USA for the entire last decade (despite rising population). That has never happened before in the USA. Yet, productivity in terms of the US GDP grew 40% (with the benefits almost entirely going to the business owners/investors). Why should that trend not continue? Mainstream economists, even liberal ones like Paul Krugman, seem pretty much oblivous to the implications. Offshoring is a huge red herring they are chasing...

Part of why mainstream economists don't have clue:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html?_r=1
"But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded." "

The current theory of motivation is changing:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

And that is from research on motivation done by the Federal Reserve Bank, MIT, University of Chicago, CMU, and other mainstream groups...

People can be right about a general issue being a problem without their solution being that great. Also, a lot of scarcity in the USA is "artificial scarcity" at this point.

If you read what Marshall Brain wrote, you'll see he is not talking about a "command economy".
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
"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's think about the USA right now in that sense. One third of the US GDP is currently spent on social "welfare" between public and private amounts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_welfare_state

That works out to about US$16,000 a citizen per year, on top of other spending (like defense, infrastructure, etc.). Without raising taxes, a family of four could be getting US$64,000 a year as a "basic income" (without "working") to spend as they saw fit (maybe somewhat less if there was universal sick care access deducted up front). They would have to pay for their own kids' education or instead homeschool, but they would have plenty of money to do so. If people wanted more than that, then they would have to work.

If we really believe in the free market, why not give that "welfare" money every year to everyone of any age equally as a basic income to spend as they want in the market, whether on goods, services, education, housing, or whatever?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Even if some small percent blow their monthly income on liquor or gambling the first day of every month, all their friends and family would have a basic income too, so they would have somewhere to crash. :-) And note that there might be a lot less addictive behavior if people were less stressed about money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

But instead of that vision of "welfare" which is labelled "socialism" or whatever bad word someone wants to call it, we waste much of that money creating a huge bureaucracy to assess "need" (even as it is more and more obvious our economy does not "need" as many people to "work" and so many people are permanently unemployed). Why the economy may continue to implode, btw:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Or we spend the money as a society to have "public schools" that, according to a NYS teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, dumb kids down to fit into a hierarchical productive system with little room for smart or creative people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"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, ent

Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.

Sorry, but it's already been tried. It's called communism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky -- they all made exactly the same arguments you are now making about Capital (machines) creating an environment of abundance, and how capitalism had buried itself, becoming outdated. It needed to be replaced by a more "realistic" economic paradigm, one of abundance. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?

As it turns out, capital didn't produce abundance. Scarcity still existed, resources could not, as a rule, be sufficiently distributed so that every man could be satisfied. There were bread lines, there were ten year waiting lists for shitty cars, there was corruption. As you state, resources are finite. Labor is finite. Even in a world totally automated by robots, the economy is fundamentally limited by its natural resources and the currently existing capital. In other words, scarcity. There is an interesting phenomenon in capitalism called "manufactured scarcity." New goods don't appear in the market because there is a need for them. They appear in the market because somebody wants to SELL them. They then convince you that you need them through advertising. Without this driving force, an economy goes stagnant. Innovation flounders. This is the reason that command economies don't work, and why no matter what Mr. Marshall Brian says about economic alternatives, he is almost certainly oversimplifying things.

Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Alternatives by me:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402

From there:

In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing the value of most paid human labor (by the law of supply and demand). At the same time, demand for stuff and services is limited for a variety of reasons — some classical, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (aided by automation and intellectual monopolies) and some novel like people finally getting too much stuff as they move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or a growing environmental consciousness. In order to move past this, our society needs to emphasize a gift economy (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux or blogging), a basic income (social security for all regardless of age), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, investments, and regulation), and stronger local economies that can produce more of their own stuff (with organic gardens, solar panels, green homes, and 3D printers). There are some bad “make work” alternatives too that are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons.

Simple attempts to prop things up, like requiring higher wages in the face of declining demand for human labor and more competition for jobs, will only accelerate the replacement process for jobs as higher wage requirements would just be more incentive to automate, redesign, and push more work to volunteer social networks. We are seeing the death spiral of current mainstream economics based primarily on a link between the right to consume and the need to have a job (even as there may remain some link for higher-than-typical consumption rates in some situations, even with a basic income, a gift economy, etc).

So, that’s the broader picture as I see it right now.

People are not making the obvious connections, because they still believe in an essentially a “religious dogma” of an economic ideology of endless growth that will produce endless paid employment for endless people (on a finite planet — even if a space program could help with that). This fundamentally ignores that the value of most new services is that they reduce the need for labor in industry or at home (once we are satiated for basic needs and even fairly high wants). So, we get, say, the recent push for government grants to push along more robotics in the USA as a White House priority without much though presumably given to the socio-economic implications of more automation.

I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.

But, beyond the economics side, it is the military side of all this that is really problematical and ironic. People have long been using all these advanced technologies of abundance (robotics, biotech, advanced materials, advanced energy sources) from a scarcity perspective of creating weapons to fight over the very scarcity that, ironically, these technologies could alleviate if created and used differently. So, we ironically get, say, military robots (drones) whose primary role is essentially to enforce a social order based on people working and acting like robots, rather that engineers just building robots to do the robot-like work and let people be people. The same is true for the misuse of nuclear energy, nanotech, rockets, and biotech all from a scarcity paradigm to

On Qualia, I can hope you are right. :-) But that all gets into metaphysics and untestable/religious areas pretty fast.

On your thoughts about what the model might be used for, I'm very much hoping you are wrong (but, I can see that, indeed, pessimistically, it may go as you say, for the sorts of social reasons you outline). A tangential item by me:
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points. :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. So, 50 * 2 = 100. Or, 2 * 50 = 100. Or, 10 * 10 = 100."

In the mid 1980s, my psychology undergraduate senior thesis paper was on, among other things, the limits to "intelligence" from an evolutionary psychology perspective. A related post:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/c80c16ac005f8a5b?hl=en
"The Hydra's superior adaptedness to its environment is for many reasons. It is a good size to allow it to replicate quickly when food is available and then disperse by floating. It can function well over a variety of sizes; it can also shrink if no food is available. Hydra may well be immortal; they may not be programmed to die like humans or many other more complex organisms. Its neural network is complex enough to allow it to feed, yet doesn't require much energy to maintain (unlike a brain). It has what it needs to survive and replicate, with perhaps a little extra useful for evolving. In terms of efficiency, they might be considered far superior to humans. There is more to survival and adaptation than intelligence. For the hydra, a big brain and increased intelligence might even be a handicap by making it more difficult to reproduce."

One may find the same things about computer models. There may be simple and useful ones, but as they get more complex, they may get harder to justify (even if sometimes more accurate in certain situations where all the assumptions hold).

Around 1987, I made one of the world's first simulations (maybe the first) of self-replicating robots that duplicated themselves from a sea of spare parts on a 2D plane (on Symbolics in ZetaLisp+Flavors). John von Neumann had talked of this, but I don't think anyone had done it (maybe someone I was not aware of)? The very first thing a robot did when it had constructed child was cannibalize it. The algorithm just had the robot get available spare parts to follow a plan, and the closest spare parts were in the child. So, I accidentally invented robotic cannibals (and worse, robotic infanticide). I had to kludge in a sense of "smell" and marking all the parts with some identifier to prevent this. I'm glad those were only simple simulations. So, sometimes seeing the emergent consequences of our assumptions in a relatively safe way can be a good thing. :-)

I wonder sometimes if Marshall Brain saw a presentation I made of it. But in any case, he's thought about the consequences quite a bit, like here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

I've spent much of my life since sort of thinking on-and-off about the implications of all that sort of stuff. Needless to say, generally no one is interested in supporting anyone to do that, at least not in a quirky way like I do it. :-) The disciplined "mainstream" rebels get all the funding: :-)
http://inetecon

On Qualia, I can hope you are right. :-) But that all gets into metaphysics and untestable/religious areas pretty fast.

On your thoughts about what the model might be used for, I'm very much hoping you are wrong (but, I can see that, indeed, pessimistically, it may go as you say, for the sorts of social reasons you outline). A tangential item by me:
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points. :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. So, 50 * 2 = 100. Or, 2 * 50 = 100. Or, 10 * 10 = 100."

In the mid 1980s, my psychology undergraduate senior thesis paper was on, among other things, the limits to "intelligence" from an evolutionary psychology perspective. A related post:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/c80c16ac005f8a5b?hl=en
"The Hydra's superior adaptedness to its environment is for many reasons. It is a good size to allow it to replicate quickly when food is available and then disperse by floating. It can function well over a variety of sizes; it can also shrink if no food is available. Hydra may well be immortal; they may not be programmed to die like humans or many other more complex organisms. Its neural network is complex enough to allow it to feed, yet doesn't require much energy to maintain (unlike a brain). It has what it needs to survive and replicate, with perhaps a little extra useful for evolving. In terms of efficiency, they might be considered far superior to humans. There is more to survival and adaptation than intelligence. For the hydra, a big brain and increased intelligence might even be a handicap by making it more difficult to reproduce."

One may find the same things about computer models. There may be simple and useful ones, but as they get more complex, they may get harder to justify (even if sometimes more accurate in certain situations where all the assumptions hold).

Around 1987, I made one of the world's first simulations (maybe the first) of self-replicating robots that duplicated themselves from a sea of spare parts on a 2D plane (on Symbolics in ZetaLisp+Flavors). John von Neumann had talked of this, but I don't think anyone had done it (maybe someone I was not aware of)? The very first thing a robot did when it had constructed child was cannibalize it. The algorithm just had the robot get available spare parts to follow a plan, and the closest spare parts were in the child. So, I accidentally invented robotic cannibals (and worse, robotic infanticide). I had to kludge in a sense of "smell" and marking all the parts with some identifier to prevent this. I'm glad those were only simple simulations. So, sometimes seeing the emergent consequences of our assumptions in a relatively safe way can be a good thing. :-)

I wonder sometimes if Marshall Brain saw a presentation I made of it. But in any case, he's thought about the consequences quite a bit, like here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

I've spent much of my life since sort of thinking on-and-off about the implications of all that sort of stuff. Needless to say, generally no one is interested in supporting anyone to do that, at least not in a quirky way like I do it. :-) The disciplined "mainstream" rebels get all the funding: :-)
http://inetecon

Extremely relevant story - http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I'm hoping for more of a gradual non-violent evolution into these changes over the next twenty to thirty years, myself:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

But, with all the ironies of people using these technologies of abundance to produce super fancy weapons like military robots to fight over percieved scaricty, it is worriesome. Rather than military robots to enforce a social order based on gettign peopel to worl like robots, why not just build robots to do any work people don't want to do voluntarily in the first place?

If it was a "revolution", think of it on the order of women getting the right to vote in the USA,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dPF0SGh_PQ
or the UK outlawing slavery (with compensation to the owners and little violence, prompted by the Quakers, compared to the bloodbath in the USA over that),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism#Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
or the "computer revolution",
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521#
and so on.

I'm not disagreeing though with your point that the potential is there for great violence -- and not just in the streets, but also abortions, domestic violence, suicides, and so on. How can we prevent that?

I'm trying in my own nutty way to recruit the global intelligence community to help with a peaceful changeover. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319

But ultimately, some sort of change will happen regardless:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Still, it might happen with less bloodshed if more people got involved sooner and understood the basic issues better.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

The USA already spends about US$800 a citizen a year between schooling, social security, and welfare. Why not just scrap all those programs and give every citizen a check for US$800 a month as a basic income? A family of four could then just about scrape by somewhere rural, and given all their spare time, and they could homeschool or purchase tutoring or private school lessons. Public school buildings could be turned into library-like learing centers. Teachers could become private tutors or just live frugally off their basic income. People would have more free time to help their elderly neighbors, too, like bringing over stuff from their gardens, even if old people got less than their current amount. And so on. Probably this would fly best with seniors if just everyone got the current social security amounts though (no one wants to get less), which might mean more taxes.

And the USA already spends more for Medicare and Medicad per capita than other countries need to cover their entire population with better results, so health care could be extended to all with some better management and a focus on better diet, curing vitamin D deficiency, and building healthier "BlueZones" infrastructure, which would all save sick care costs, making single payer he

I think it will be good overall (barring things like irony killing us all)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
since it it a return to hunter/gatherer ideology with high techology, where hunter/gathers spent much of their time just rasining kids, socializing, and doing hobbies or contemplating nature and the infinite.
    http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

The robots are like the botanical plants that people used to pick the fruits from.

It is a form of natural capitalism in the sense that the planet and its infrastructure is essentially owned by all the people, who then get dividends as citizen capitalists. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_history_lesson_pre-scarcity_times_Eden_then_scarcity_times_Dickens_then_post-scarcity_times_real_soon_now

You can have a basic income as suggested in Manna to schedule and distribute what the robots make through a sort of market demand force.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Or, if things get so abundant, like if 3D printing gets really good, you get perhaps Star Trek where people have moved beyond money, and you get mostly a gift economy and various sorts of ad-hoc planning and organizing like, say, Debian GNU/Linux.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202

Typical hunter/gatherers had a gift economy and essentially collective land "ownership".
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo

Related to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-sector_hypothesis

People went from 90% agriculture workers to about 2% agriculutre workers over the past two hundred years in the USA. Of the current agriculutral production, 75% of the effort goes to meat production which is not strictly needed and in general is harming people's health, and otherwise people eat too much of the wrong foods and are obese (see Dr. Fuhrman). Why is agriculture still not using 90% of the labor force? Automation and limited demand.

Compulsory schools were created to keep kids off the street and train them to be soldiers and factory workers. Working hours went down from 12 hours 6 days a week to 8 hours five days a week, and only for adults. Child labor was outlawed. So, much of the working force was freed.

In 1950, about 30% of the workforce was in manufacturing. Now it is more like aroung 12%, and the same amount of stuff is still produced (plus some is imported from China). Why? Increasing automation, better design, and limited demand. Many people are drowning in junk that clutters their homes and lives.

Granted, in the USA, women have gone into the work force and there are other confounding factors.

What happens when services go the same way through robotics and other automation, better design, voluntary social networks, and limited demand?
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/

Consider also that unlike food and some basic goods, most services are optional.

It turns out even most medical care is probably harmful and unneccesary, compared to just eating better and getting adequate vitamin D.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

The entire economy is poised to implode.
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Think about it, and you will see that in the end of the "Automate Everything" trend, only the rich and super rich will have meaningful lives and the only alternative will be subservience.

Only within the existing capitalist framework - which would become more and more redundant in that scenario. There is little doubt that those in power would try to preserve it, but it doesn't have to be that way.

This is a fairly good treatment of the problem, and both possible outcomes.

Very interesting. Thanks for your work on this. I'll read it.

Meanwhile, for everyone else, here's a sci-fi primer on the idea of Burger-G and how you can expect to lose your job:

Manna

The canonical article on this topic, by the founder of HowStuffWorks:

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

Consider also: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/the-average-worker-and-the-average-machine

If we can grow the economy 40% without adding new workers last decade, why can we not do it again this decade? Or better, as robots are getting better?
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

"Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes" by Alfie Kohn
    http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0395710901
"Have Fun at Work" by W. L. Livingston
    http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937063053/
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives" by Jeff Schmidt
    http://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professionals-Soul-Battering/dp/0742516857

And something I organized on why work as we know it is going away (according to Marshall Brain and many others, given that the same technology that makes fancy computer games with fancy game AIs possible is also reducing the value of most human labor relative to automation and better design):
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
    http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Ultimately, there will be no greener pastures to leave towards as robotics spreads; see for example Marshall Brain's "Manna":
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I agree with the sentiment, as does this author ...

Marshall Brain's "Manna" ... but the problem is that the game is rigged for the _current_ owners, who don't want to see their wedge of the pie cut into by those nasty filthy peons they have to employ.

Maybe we could rethink society so we don't have to do things machines could, and still not starve.

Yes, but such suggestions would mean that the rich could no longer lord it over the poor, and thus are a form of communism, and thus are evil. Why do you hate freedom so much?

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm has some interesting sources of revenue for Govt

Wealth redistribution means you take money by force from one group and give it to another, without any promise of paying it back. You don't go broke that way. As for the wackademic comment ... it's just my personal opinion. If you want an appeal to authority though, Marshall Brain is beyond a shadow of the doubt more of an entrepreneur than a wackademic ... here are his thoughts :

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

Tools like the vacuum cleaner and washing machine were supposed to give us all more leisure time - it looks like we're not very good at using it well - yet. There would be some who would want to be creative with their robot and others who just want to make the most money possible with theirs (maybe a form of creativity? I don't think so, but others might). With sufficient technology, here's a possibility of what could be done (not my work): http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Automation, better design, voluntary social networks and limited demand mean that the value of most human labor is rapidly decreasing. Implicit in your comments is the assumption we need everyone to be working to produce all the goods and services we need (or want). But, that assumption is less and less true. Depending on who you believe and how you define unemployment, unemployment in the USA right now is somewhere between 10% and about 25%. Further, compared to a century or two ago, when children worked in factories and mines, and practically no one "retired", and practically no one went to college or graduate school, and people worked 70 hour work week (in factories or on farms), unemployment now could be thought of as 50% to 75% or higher compared to a century ago. The fact is, compared to then, essentially nobody in the USA is working, and those who work are not doing very much of it. It's true that if you go back to hunter/gatherer times (see Marshall Sahlins), you'll find a similar pattern (only some worked, and then it was not very hard).

For example, look at this video of a robot arm throwing a cell phone into the air and catching it, and tell me that most human labor will be needed in manufacturing in twenty years:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
Even China is starting to have issues with manufacturing unemployment. How long before many services go the same way as agriculture and manufacturing? Yet our entire schooling system is still oriented around turning out mostly factory workers and soldiers.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Anyway, so I think current trends show that work has long been going away (even as demand has increased greatly up to a point). Further, in the USA, most people have long gone past the point of diminishing returns for more stuff and bigger homes to the point of negative returns (due to the destruction of community and family) -- even as some 10% to 20% of the US population has been left out of that and is relatively impoverished and would benefit greatly from more stuff.
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
"Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948879/

The happiest places in the world usually have both material abundance and strong social programs:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7585729&page=1
"According to a 2005 editorial, published in the British Medical Journal and authored by Dr. Tony Delamothe, research done in Mexico, Ghana, Sweden, the U.S. and the U.K. shows that individuals typically get richer during their lifetimes, but not happier. It is family, social and community networks that bring joy to one's life, according to Delamothe. "

Some related links:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/american.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

Except for the point that if families had that much money, the parents would not have to work that much (not even one job), and so would have time to homeschool. If you had three kids, and lived in NYS where US$20,000 is spent per kid per year, a working class family with three kids would have US$60,000 a year just to stay home with the kids and homeschool. And, at this point, there are lots of free educational materials on the internet; examples:
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html

Maybe I'm presenting "puppies and rainbows", but it is a lot better than the dystopia outlined here (given that the value of all human labor is rapidly declining from automation, better design, and voluntary social networks):
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

What about when consumers can buy nanotech 3D printers? :-)
http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing

And then print their own solar cells, 3D printers, and matter extractors and recyclers? :-)

Mainstream economics, if it ever made any sense, is on its way out...

That said, totally free global markets might not be that bad if there was a global basic income as a human right for every person to regularly claim some part of the fruits of the industrial commons:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/papers.html

And of course some way to account for externalities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

And a way to limit the concentration of wealth and power that can destroy the free market by regulatory capture (as happens all too often in the USA...)

Note that Friedrich Hayek said he was not against government intervention if it was based on "a clear set of principles", and a basic income as a human right (which also might smooth out business cycles), as well as concerns about externalities and concentration of wealth and power, might fit that definition:
"The road to serfdom: text and documents"
http://books.google.com/books?id=qg61T_I1mwsC&pg=PA20
"... he repeatedly emphasized in his talks before business groups that he was not against government intervention per se: "I think what is needed is a clear set of principles which enables us to distinguish between the legitimate fields of government activities and the illegitimate fields of government activity.""

Otherwise, without a human right to make a claim on the fruits of the industrial commons, what are you going to do if robots, AI, better design, and saturated demand take your job? Marshall Brain painted that picture, and it is not pretty:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

And Frances Moore Lappé has already pointed out how starvation is quite possible around plenty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Moore_Lapp%C3%A9
"Throughout her works Lappé has argued that world hunger is caused not by the lack of food but rather by the inability of hungry people to gain access to the abundant amount of food that exists in the world and/or food-producing resources because they are simply too poor. She has posited that our current "thin democracy" creates a maldistribution of power and resources that inevitably creates waste and an artificial scarcity of the essentials for sustainable living."

Some other ideas about freedom, if you are interested:
"Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning"
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm

And from Ivan Illich's deschooling society, that echoes some of Hayek's points:
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
"""
The choice is between two radically opposed institutional types, both of which are exemplified in certain existing institutions, although one type so characterizes the contemporary period. as to almost define it. This dominant type I would propose to call the manipulative institution. The other type also exists, but only precariously. The institutions which

Robots, AI, better design, and limited demand are probably going to take your job eventually; see Marshall Brain's "Manna" story for what it might look like:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

You can worship the "free market" abstraction all you want, and by extension the big companies that dominate it,
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
but enlightened self-interest (let alone morality) suggests you should be more on the side of the humans than an abstract concept about exchange, one that ignores externalities as well as the negative side of the concentration of wealth by using huge immortal amoral corporations that would treat any human like a piece of discardable machinery if it is profitable.

With a 21st century technosphere capable of producing so much abundance for all, for humanity to survive, we need fundamental change in our basic economic paradigms like a basic income (which works with the market but is a human right saying everyone has a right to some fruits of the industrial commons),
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Or going further, we need some mix of a basic income and a gift economy, improved local subsistence, making work into play, resource based planning, and other things...

Something related I helped organize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

By the way, if we moved to a basic income (a check from the government that is enough to live on each month, with no means test, funded by taxes or some other means), then it might be justified to do away with some of those other employee protections you decry, because engineers would have the freedom to say "No" and walk away. That might do a lot more to make the US competitive than the race to the bottom for US engineers that you propose.
"Freedom as the Power to Say No"
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/pdf/2004Widerquist.pdf

China will be where the US is soon enough (twenty years?), with a jobless recovery with economic growth but no new jobs, as China's productivity per worker continues to grow and then demand gets saturated when people there realize there is a law of diminishing returns to more goods and services (especially as people move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to want to do more of their own self-directed stuff). What then?

The best things in life are cheap or free, and if they were not, what kind of world would that be anyway? Someday the Chinese will realize that, hopefully before they finish trashing their environment. At least there is some good news about improvement on Chinese environmental policy lately, so I can hope the Chinese are moving up that curve...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_of_China

By the way, as for why all those US worker protections are so important in the "free market", try reading "The China Price".
http://thechinaprice.org/home.html
"The book exposes a system of unregistered factories that cut corners on safety and working conditions to meet multinational companies' demands for ever-lower prices. It documents how China's export manufacturing industry allows millions of workers to move slowly out of poverty - even as they pay a price in terms of their own health. How the country's coal mining sector continues to thrive - even as it produces a stunning 70 percent of the world's coal mining deaths. And how a growing number of younger wo

You're not the only one with that idea - see Manna. Ignore the parts of the projected communist wonderland and wide-eyed open source optimism at your own convenience; the greed and callousness displayed seems a pretty realistic, albeit depressing estimate.

An envisioning of this scenario is available online:

Manna

I saw this story a while back, and it's (somewhat) relevant to the idea of replacing humans with robots -- beginning with management.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I'd wonder if they're still in business. People who are good at what they're doing tend to find jobs anywhere. People who're bad at what they're doing have to swallow whatever their boss subjects them to.

True, in general. But there's an interesting cautionary tale (by the guy who founded HowStuffWorks.com, oddly enough) that posits a corollary -- what if you were bad at doing something once, but an all-knowing never-forgetting system prevents you from *ever* putting it behind you?

As these communication networks between all the different Manna systems built up, things started to get uncomfortable for every worker. For example, the Manna software in each store knew about employee performance in microscopic detail -- how often the employee was on time or early, how quickly the employee did tasks, how quickly the employee answered the phone and responded to email, how the customers rated the employee and so on. When an employee left a store and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other Manna system could request the employee's performance record. If an employee had "issues" -- late, slow, disorganized, unkempt -- it became nearly impossible for that employee to get another job. Nearly every company with minimum wage employees used Manna software or something similar, and performance records on employees were a major commodity freely exchanged between corporations. A marginal employee got blacklisted in the system very quickly.

- from Manna, by Marshall Brain

Brain's dystopian vision (like most others) is full of glaring flaws -- he completely discounts the ability of people to drop "below the radar" -- but it's an interesting reference whenever another story comes out about how automation is making us "more productive".

Yes, a fundamental issue in a high-tech world becomes not so much how to produce more, but how to distribute what is produced. Marshall Brain wrote a sci-fi story about that here, with both a dystopian and a utopian ending depending on whether things produced by robots are distributed unequally or equally (as everyone loses their "jobs").
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Thanks for that reference to "Making Money".
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Money

See for example Marshall Brain's writings:
    http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A list of current robotics videos I put together, with robots doing everything from milk cows, prune grape vines, throw and catch cell phones, put laundry in washing machines, invent and test new theories in yeast genetics, and do autopsies (the last one isn't a video, thankfully):
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

So, ID cards and worries about illegal immigrants are all a distraction from rethinking the economy along the lines of having some mix of a basic income, local subsistence production from 3D printing and organic gardening, a gift economy like GNU/Linux, better resource-based planning, making work into play, a spread of local currencies and LETS systems, and lots of other possibilities I helped organize here for moving beyond a jobless recovery:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

If you want to worry, worry about how to build an economy where we get past the irony of using abundant military robots to enforce a scarcity-based economic system designed around getting humans to work like robots. :-)

See for example Marshall Brain's writings:
    http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A list of current robotics videos I put together, with robots doing everything from milk cows, prune grape vines, throw and catch cell phones, put laundry in washing machines, invent and test new theories in yeast genetics, and do autopsies (the last one isn't a video, thankfully):
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

So, ID cards and worries about illegal immigrants are all a distraction from rethinking the economy along the lines of having some mix of a basic income, local subsistence production from 3D printing and organic gardening, a gift economy like GNU/Linux, better resource-based planning, making work into play, a spread of local currencies and LETS systems, and lots of other possibilities I helped organize here for moving beyond a jobless recovery:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

If you want to worry, worry about how to build an economy where we get past the irony of using abundant military robots to enforce a scarcity-based economic system designed around getting humans to work like robots. :-)

To turn that around, advanced technology, sir, is walking a line dangerously close to communism! :-)

That's because we are seeing the value of most human labor slowly plummeting to zero (one reason why no one can afford health insurance anymore except the doctors and medical equipment manufacturer owners. :-) See:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

So, as Marshall Brain suggests, the end point of capitalism is the starvation of all people who do not have a lot of capital (because, when their labor is worthless, they will not be able to pay for food, clothes, rent, medical costs, etc.). Everything from milking cows to doing genetic research is being automated:
"VMS robotic milking"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPqWpOxQmIs
"Robot Scientist Makes Discovery"
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/02/robot-scientist.html

Robots are making the leap from less coordinated than humans to more coordinated than humans:
"High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation"
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

More links to robot videos here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

The thing is, "ownership" is ultimately a political construction:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

Propped up by millionaire wannabees and slightly privileged guards:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Coming Revolt of the Guards"
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

Are you a billionaire? Otherwise, by capitalist standards, if your work can eventually be automated, your life will then be worthless in their eyes, and you should then logically starve once everything you can do of value to billionaires has been automated. And don't say you'll just get another job, because as Marshall Brain suggests, that one will be automated too once we pass some critical thresholds in AI and robotics. That's like saying you will hide under a tree to stay dry in a rainstorm and when that tree gets wet through you will go find another.

The only question is, do we put in place social reforms now, or do we wait until even more people are starving? Well, there's an obvious answer to that in a capitalist society, and as American financier Jay Gould said after hiring strikebreakers, it is "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

So, ideally, we need to find alternatives to a society build around a conception of work:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

The real reason why violent (and other) games are evil in a way is just that they are a distraction from dealing with that very serious issue of rethinking our society on some better ba

To turn that around, advanced technology, sir, is walking a line dangerously close to communism! :-)

That's because we are seeing the value of most human labor slowly plummeting to zero (one reason why no one can afford health insurance anymore except the doctors and medical equipment manufacturer owners. :-) See:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

So, as Marshall Brain suggests, the end point of capitalism is the starvation of all people who do not have a lot of capital (because, when their labor is worthless, they will not be able to pay for food, clothes, rent, medical costs, etc.). Everything from milking cows to doing genetic research is being automated:
"VMS robotic milking"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPqWpOxQmIs
"Robot Scientist Makes Discovery"
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/02/robot-scientist.html

Robots are making the leap from less coordinated than humans to more coordinated than humans:
"High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation"
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

More links to robot videos here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

The thing is, "ownership" is ultimately a political construction:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

Propped up by millionaire wannabees and slightly privileged guards:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Coming Revolt of the Guards"
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

Are you a billionaire? Otherwise, by capitalist standards, if your work can eventually be automated, your life will then be worthless in their eyes, and you should then logically starve once everything you can do of value to billionaires has been automated. And don't say you'll just get another job, because as Marshall Brain suggests, that one will be automated too once we pass some critical thresholds in AI and robotics. That's like saying you will hide under a tree to stay dry in a rainstorm and when that tree gets wet through you will go find another.

The only question is, do we put in place social reforms now, or do we wait until even more people are starving? Well, there's an obvious answer to that in a capitalist society, and as American financier Jay Gould said after hiring strikebreakers, it is "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

So, ideally, we need to find alternatives to a society build around a conception of work:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

The real reason why violent (and other) games are evil in a way is just that they are a distraction from dealing with that very serious issue of rethinking our society on some better ba