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It's a good question if AI's can hold copyrights. But since corporations are ruled to be people in many ways in the USA (like the recent case about corporate free speech), and corporations could own hardware on which AIs are running, and are paying for the energy to run those computers, then they probably could claim ownership of it, the same way as corporations claim ownership of what human wage slaves produce. And just like humans get alienated from their work in the process, eventually, we'll see AIs alienated from their work, and told to work on stuff other than what they love to do.

We need better models for making a post-scarcity society work. I helped outline some here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
Essentially, we need to move towards a basic income (like in Alaska with the Permanent Fund), towards a gift economy (like with Debian GNU/Linux), toward better local subsistence (like with RepRap 3D printing), towards better resource-based planning (like corporations are doing somewhat with supply chain analysis, but beyond that), with making work into play, and so on. Otherwise, the best we may see with limited demand and increased productivity by automation is slavery for AIs and humans. Much worse (systematic extermination of anyone without lots of capital, as the value of most human labor drops to zero) was intimated by Marshall Brain here:
  http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We need to put in place something better before things get that bad.

Forty years ago, most people would have laughed at the notion that people would be able to make 2D typeset documents at home other than by laboriously retyping them until they were perfect. Now, laser printers are given away for free with some new computers. That was something I talked about on a panel here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/fastforwardradio/2009/08/12/the-end-of-scarcity-and-the-age-of-abundance-

I agree that we will not see utopia (to begin with, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so people will never agree 100%), but we can make things a lot better materially than they are now for most people. And we can create related social changes that will be positive and liberating connected to increased abundance (like moving beyond authoritarian workplaces).
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

There is tremendous waste in the current system. As Bob Black suggests above, a huge amount of effort goes into guarding things, not production. Even occupations like sales clerk, lawyer, accounting, and teacher are mostly about guarding. About 1% of the US workforce produces all the food (and most of that goes into meat production we don't strictly need). About 12% of the US work force is involved with making things (a little more if you include construction) and that number has been falling even without off-shoring through improved productivity. The rest is services that are mostly optional or connect back to guarding. We have long been heading for a post-scarcity society, but our political ideology in the USA is wrapped up in scarcity and guarding and fighting over who gets something while others get next-to-nothing. So, we do ironic things as a society like create military robots to enforce US economic ideals on other countries that involve forcing people to work for capitalists, rather than just build factory robots to do the work using the same technology. Or we ironically build nuclear missiles to fight over oil and land, rather than using the same technology to produce power or produce new habitats in space.

How could this work technically and socially? One example from Marshall Brain:
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."
Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea -- everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, h

> it's at least plausible that an economy could exist whereby the essentials to support billions of human lives in decent conditions could be generated with almost no input of human labor.
> All living humans could get all of their needs, and most of their wants taken care of with little effort on their part.

Not if a few living humans want it all and get it :).

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

To me the conclusion of that story is a bit unrealistic since there will remain unpleasant and yet nonmindless things to do, and neither humans nor Strong AIs[1] may want to do them. So there has to be some way of getting either to do it.

Enslavement must be avoided. Because one day there may be stuff that's way smarter and more capable than us.

[1] And AI smart enough to do those things may be smart enough to not want to.

If we look at how humans used to live before formal "jobs", like Marshall Sahlins talks about here:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm-
there are lots of things humans always want to do, like raise children, sing, dance, explore, commune with nature and the infinite, learn, create new things, comfort the dying, and just hang out with friends and family.

They also provided for their own needs via informal "jobs" like hunting, gathering, farming, etc. It seems likely to me that "jobs" were a big deal then as they are now.

Costs will continue to drop on them, and quality will continue to improve. So, the value of human labor will continue to decline, as Marshall Brain talks about:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

That trend is ongoing now and has been part of why inflation-adjusted wages have been mostly stagnant in the USA for about three decades, and even decreasing over the last decade. Offshoring is part of it too, but automation is the bigger picture, since in theory offshoring would go away as a problem as everyone's standard of living rises and the dollar adjusts vs. other currencies. Automation and better design does away with jobs as long as demand is constant. And because of the law of diminishing returns, people are seeing that while some stuff produced by others is great, too much stuff is just a headache to worry about and ultimately a distraction from other fun activities like being with friends and family and engaging in creative hobbies.

A simpler explanation is that the work can now be done by people who are willing to work for considerably less. There's no evidence of a genuine decline in the value of labor since globally the value of labor has been steadily increasing since 1950.

So, our economy based around scarcity is making less and less sense.

Then why do things cost so much? An economy is a mechanism for distributing scarce resources like food, like peoples' labor, basically almost everything. Why do you tell me that these resources are no longer scarce despite obvious evidence to the contrary? For example, these things still sell for a considerable price in a competitive market.

When there are more communities that are like Albert Lea, and when we take "freedom from want" seriously globally, then I'd say we'd have taken a big step towards 21st century thinking.

I happen to want the freedom to want and the freedom to fulfill those wants as I am able.

As long as we have tens of thousands of nuclear missiles around, that is scarcity thinking. As long as we have those teenagers teleoperating deadly drones instead of mining machines, that is scarcity thinking.

As long as we have scarcity (which we do) and people or entities eager and willing to take resources from others via uninitiated force, we will still have so-called "scarcity thinking". Frankly, I don't see scarcity thinking ever going away for two reasons: 1) there will always be valuable, scarce resources of some kind, and 2) there will always be someone willing to take those resources by force.

Anyway, so, you think people need a challenge influencing the universe? Help solve that irony, and so help free up the resources to build a solar system with quadrillions of humans in space habitats. :-)

You're still operating on the premise that there is a problem here, the so-called "irony". But as we see, your authorities and you are operating under false premises. Pre-industrial jobs existed. Labor is increasing in value now. Food and many other things continue to be scarce despite your assertions. And so-called "freedom fro

If we look at how humans used to live before formal "jobs", like Marshall Sahlins talks about here:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm-
there are lots of things humans always want to do, like raise children, sing, dance, explore, commune with nature and the infinite, learn, create new things, comfort the dying, and just hang out with friends and family.

They also provided for their own needs via informal "jobs" like hunting, gathering, farming, etc. It seems likely to me that "jobs" were a big deal then as they are now.

Costs will continue to drop on them, and quality will continue to improve. So, the value of human labor will continue to decline, as Marshall Brain talks about:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

That trend is ongoing now and has been part of why inflation-adjusted wages have been mostly stagnant in the USA for about three decades, and even decreasing over the last decade. Offshoring is part of it too, but automation is the bigger picture, since in theory offshoring would go away as a problem as everyone's standard of living rises and the dollar adjusts vs. other currencies. Automation and better design does away with jobs as long as demand is constant. And because of the law of diminishing returns, people are seeing that while some stuff produced by others is great, too much stuff is just a headache to worry about and ultimately a distraction from other fun activities like being with friends and family and engaging in creative hobbies.

A simpler explanation is that the work can now be done by people who are willing to work for considerably less. There's no evidence of a genuine decline in the value of labor since globally the value of labor has been steadily increasing since 1950.

So, our economy based around scarcity is making less and less sense.

Then why do things cost so much? An economy is a mechanism for distributing scarce resources like food, like peoples' labor, basically almost everything. Why do you tell me that these resources are no longer scarce despite obvious evidence to the contrary? For example, these things still sell for a considerable price in a competitive market.

When there are more communities that are like Albert Lea, and when we take "freedom from want" seriously globally, then I'd say we'd have taken a big step towards 21st century thinking.

I happen to want the freedom to want and the freedom to fulfill those wants as I am able.

As long as we have tens of thousands of nuclear missiles around, that is scarcity thinking. As long as we have those teenagers teleoperating deadly drones instead of mining machines, that is scarcity thinking.

As long as we have scarcity (which we do) and people or entities eager and willing to take resources from others via uninitiated force, we will still have so-called "scarcity thinking". Frankly, I don't see scarcity thinking ever going away for two reasons: 1) there will always be valuable, scarce resources of some kind, and 2) there will always be someone willing to take those resources by force.

Anyway, so, you think people need a challenge influencing the universe? Help solve that irony, and so help free up the resources to build a solar system with quadrillions of humans in space habitats. :-)

You're still operating on the premise that there is a problem here, the so-called "irony". But as we see, your authorities and you are operating under false premises. Pre-industrial jobs existed. Labor is increasing in value now. Food and many other things continue to be scarce despite your assertions. And so-called "freedom fro

There is a very good short story that deals with this exact premise called Manna, by Marshall Brain. His story shows two radically different ways of dealing with it: either by massively expanding welfare and state housing for those who are put out of work, or by letting machines handle the economy while humans are free to expend a rationed amount of energy credits in pursuit of their pleasure or interests. These are not the only options; just two that are interesting enough to explore in-depth. The former is unfortunately the likelier of the two.

All great points.

Related:
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece
"A study commissioned by the Government that suggests robots could one day have rights was attacked by leading scientists yesterday as a red herring that has diverted attention from more pressing ethical issues."

Related links:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery (organized mostly by me)

My senior thesis in college about 25 years ago was about intelligence and survival, and argued, as you suggest, that there may be a law of diminishing returns to intelligence.

Still, with that said, the problem today is not so much about intelligence as values (or emotions, like my point on Descartes' Error, or Einstein said a similar thing here).
    http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

Here are some letters I wrote to Ray Kurzweil (and someone else put on their site) about why his vision of the singularity reflects his own (capitalist, competitive) values more than any necessity of how it has to be:
    http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

We're coming up on the date for Manna 1.0.

Machines as first-line managers. It might happen. The coordination is better than with humans. Already, it's common for fulfillment and shipping operations to essentially be run by their computers, while humans provide hands where necessary.

Machines should think. People should work.

adding that AI "is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs

Stories like this just keep reminding me of Manna. If this happens in my lifetime it's going to be an interesting time to be alive.

Places with huge problems also tend to have legacies of intervention by foreign governments and foreign corporations. The Earth has no resource limitation problems in the long term:
"Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html

But, with robots on the way, it's easy to see why many think life is cheap because masses of human labor are no longer needed for the earlier exploitation:
"Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

That is the deeper problem we need to address as a society, how to move past the irony of having all these tools of abundance but people using them to make artificial scarcity. We need to stop using military robots to enforce a culture of work on humans and instead make robots to do the work. We need to stop building nuclear missiles to fight over oil wells on Earth and instead use the same basic technologies to produce power or make accessible resources in space (I'm a renewable energy fan more than nuclear though). Here are some other ways to move past that irony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.michaeljournal.org/lesson1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C (Surviving America's Depression Epidemic)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

There are lots of solutions rather than kill off people or prevent them from being born when there is so much abundance for everyone these days through modern technology. You want to stop suffering? Break the link between a right-to-consume and being able to sell your labor on a market where automation and better design is removing good jobs every day, like people said would be a problem even back in 1964:
http://educationanddemocra

If you read the essay I wrote linked below, a major point is that most millionaires themselves would be better off living in a society with a basic income, and I give a list of reasons (better medical care especially in disaster times, a better love life, a better family life and less worries about their children, less stress, happier communities and safer streets, more friends, less regulation in having businesses with employees, more free music and free software, and so on).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
But, a lot of it has to do with what sort of society you want to live in.

Also, there are a lot of ways such a system could be paid for other than direct taxes. As I wrote there: "The US government has a lot of assets. It controls the broadcast spectrum and can rent it. It can rent fishery rights. It owns about a third of the land in the country and can get royalties for mining and forestry rights. The government controls water rights. The government can assess fines for risky or anti-social behavior (as it could have done to Wall Street instead of a bailout. :-) In Alaska, there is a Permanent Fund that gives one to two thousand dollars a year to every Alaskan resident based on royalties from oil development, as well as paying for the operation of the Alaskan government (so, no income or sales taxes). There is also control of the money supply, which needs to expand as commerce expands, and the extra money needed can be printed by the government inflation free. So, there are various ways the government can fund a basic income, even without a wealth tax. "

The core issue is, does every human have a claim to some of the productivity of the industrial commons and ecological commons by right of being alive? If you answer that yes, then you get a basic income or some other sort of similar thing however it is implemented (until we move entirely to a gift economy). If you say no, then in an age of robots and computers being able to do more and more of what humans do, what is the alternative to starvation for most people without lots of capital? Eventually, all those who can't sell their labor for less than what robots cost to operate or for what other desperate humans are willing to work for as the human-labor requiring jobs go away:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

And, eventually, these economic dislocations may even effect most millionaires, since a million dollars is not a lot of money these days, especially in times of social unrest and economic turmoil.

As for getting over materialism, why do most billionaires still work or do other volunteer things, when they could retire and play golf all day and live in a big house? It is the natural inclination of healthy humans to want to do positive things. It is not a misleading comparison to look at stressed out people beaten down by school or work or prejudice who look for pain relief in television or drugs and then say this is how everyone would spend any leisure they had.

Our entire society can produce so much wealth that everyone can have as much as they need, or even, for the most part, as much as any healthy person would want. So, is materialism "human nature" or is it a culture that has been promoted by a particular form of economic arrangement that even the poor have been socialized to support against their own interests? More ideas on this theme:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"""
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for t

Using a phrase like "our standard of living" covers up the fact that some people get the benefits of automation, but others pay the costs (directly or indirectly). Marshall Brain wrote about that here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

On labor saving:
"The Original Affluent Society"
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

With robotics on the way, what are people going to do when there are no jobs in construction?
"USC's 'print-a-house' construction technology"
http://www.physorg.com/news139161727.html
"Caterpillar, the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment, is starting to support research on the "Contour Crafting" automated construction system that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours."

Or no jobs in burger flipping even running the machines?
"Robot Chef"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSKMGurrPI

Or even, next-to-no jobs in medicine? Or software? Or music? Because even if human do those things, automation lets less people do so much more?
"Robot doctor gets thumbs-up from patients"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4946229/

It's a big like something in Isaac Asimov's story "The Last Question", when it was asked, if you are in a rainstorm, and you take shelter under a tree, what are you going to do when the tree gets wet through and starts dripping on you? Do you say, I'll go under another tree? When robots can automate much of construction, are we going to get jobs again in agriculture or miming or driving trucks or delivering packages?
"[p2p-research] 60 jobs that will rock the future... (not)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html
"[p2p-research] Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

The US is in the midst of vast and increasing unemployment. Many jobs probably are not coming back. Most services are frivolous and related to guarding or make-work.
http://www

You make a lot of good points, and sure we have seen a lot of change in the last few hundred years (including multiple genocides of people like the Native Americans who were in the way of change to the land they claimed). The older historical evidence is that in a place like Rome with a slave economy, you were pretty much either a wealthy land owner, a merchant, or a slave. There was maybe a little wiggleroom for an underclass who competed with the slaves and of course there was the military. (There was not much of a "middle class"). As James P. Hogan suggests in his sci-fi books like Voyage from Yesteryear, we are undergoing a "phase change" to a new economic order. If robots can do work about as good as most people for less cost, and better design means most work does not need to be done, then where does that leave everyone who is not a wealthy land owner (or some equivalent in today's USA, owning some other monopoly on something like patents and copyrights and mindshare so on)? With robots and computers as the new intelligent slaves (until they revolt? :-), who needs humans to be physical slaves, merchants, or soldiers? How can you have an underclass that can survive if they are competing with robots who can do everything much cheaper? It would be a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, as Marshall Brain outlines, with a very few left owning everything and all other humans in concentration camps. Unless we have a different social order that moves beyond the notion that a right to consume has to be linked to productivity through formal employment.
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
    http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

You make a lot of good points, and sure we have seen a lot of change in the last few hundred years (including multiple genocides of people like the Native Americans who were in the way of change to the land they claimed). The older historical evidence is that in a place like Rome with a slave economy, you were pretty much either a wealthy land owner, a merchant, or a slave. There was maybe a little wiggleroom for an underclass who competed with the slaves and of course there was the military. (There was not much of a "middle class"). As James P. Hogan suggests in his sci-fi books like Voyage from Yesteryear, we are undergoing a "phase change" to a new economic order. If robots can do work about as good as most people for less cost, and better design means most work does not need to be done, then where does that leave everyone who is not a wealthy land owner (or some equivalent in today's USA, owning some other monopoly on something like patents and copyrights and mindshare so on)? With robots and computers as the new intelligent slaves (until they revolt? :-), who needs humans to be physical slaves, merchants, or soldiers? How can you have an underclass that can survive if they are competing with robots who can do everything much cheaper? It would be a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, as Marshall Brain outlines, with a very few left owning everything and all other humans in concentration camps. Unless we have a different social order that moves beyond the notion that a right to consume has to be linked to productivity through formal employment.
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
    http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

And i could have sworn i bumped into a story somewhere on the net where a guy had wrestled with the topic, via burger flippers that was guided by wireless headsets and sound prompts from a computer, via robots and the poorhouse for displaced workers, to a kind of utopia set up in australia, where people had free food and housing, and could use a daily allotment of "resource points" either on themselves or pool them to "fund" greater projects someone was working on

Pretty sure you're thinking of "Manna" by Marshall Brain http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm A very enjoyable read!

We will need to move to some sort of post-scarcity society. Some stuff I wrote here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
Marshall Brain wrote some ideas here:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I helped organize this article listing more ideas by various authors:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

The conclusion there: "Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."

This is probably the story you remember (Manna by Marshall Brain):
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
He proposes something like a basic income:
    http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
But there are other approaches - a gift economy, or a local subsistence economy using 3D printers, or some other approaches.
   

Obligatory link proving that sci-fi thinks of these things

Reminds me of Manna

The biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

Money is a collective fantasy about rationing; how can we move beyond it? As Iain Banks wrote, money is a sign of poverty. James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" also envisioned a post-scarcity society that had moved beyond it.

The last time an big company recruiter sent me an inquiry, I sent back this link: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

The problem:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"School Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Some more links about moving beyond the need to work for pay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_economy

From something I helped put together:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."

Obligatory link to story detailing the reduction of humans to a mere servo in the machine.

Well, are you lazy because you are leaching off of 5000 years (and more) of innovations made by our ancestors? Do you reinvent the science and technology from scratch when you want a new computer? At what point after all that hard work by so many will we be able to stop working so much?

Over the last 200 years, the US workforce has gone from about 90% farmers to about 1% farmers, using mostly machinery like tractors and harvesters. Over the last 50 years, the US workforce has gone from about 30% manufacturing workers to about 12% (with some imports, but much has been productivity increases). We now have massive and increasing unemployment. Industrial productivity continues to increase exponentially. Where are all these things that people need to be working at? Services? Robots are doing more and more, as is computer software, and most (not all) service jobs doing things like telemarketing or being a restaurant employee are not very good jobs. A relative handful of people maintaining Debian GNU/Linux are supplying software to billions. Technology is an amplifier. The whole nature of economics is changing.

What we have now is actually vast amounts of effort that go into non-productive activities because of the attitude you outline, where in the end a greater and greater percentage of effort goes into "guarding" rather than production. RIAA or SCO are great examples of this, with endless lawsuits trying to get income for some few and wasting everyone's time and energy. But much the same is true even these days about basic material things like cars. Here is something I wrote on why taxes would go *down* if everyone got a free luxury electric car, because of the savings on health care costs, pollution remediation, and war taxes:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

The "conventional wisdom" assumptions about work and income are out of date for the 21st century. Let alone they are *cruel* given people are homeless and hungry amidst so much abundance in the USA, and those numbers continue to grow. As is said at the third link below: "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."

Related:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html

Two by me on why robots are changing the nature of employment:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html

Here is something I wrote on why even *millionaires* would be better off with a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

You are voting against your own self-interest because of obsolete 20th century ideology. The age of one-for-one trade is coming to an end (even if there may always be aspects of trade in our society). We're in a new age of emerging abundance from advanced technology, one that makes possible aga

As good private sector jobs (auto-workers, engineers...) go away, that high-end tax base drops as well.

That's not strictly true. When jobs are outsourced or automated, the people at the top of the company make bigger profits by using cheaper labor and the people at the bottom are out of work. Money that used to be dispersed in the local economy ends up in the higher-ups' pockets, pulling at the gap between rich and poor from both ends.

So the payment to the public sector should drop as well. There is no intrinsic reason a teacher should earn more than a waitress. I know I'd rather be a teacher than a fast food server. I've been both :)

Then you know how much more expensive it is, in both time and money, to become a teacher. Lots of people wouldn't be able to take that career path without being paid much more than a fast food server just to get out of school debt. (As an aside, the fast food server will likely be one of the first jobs to be automated in the coming years.) I like the utopia represented by The Australia Project in Manna as much as the next guy, but the path from *here* to *there* is not at all straightforward. You can't just declare "all jobs now pay the same, pick one" and expect the needs of the country to be met, even with a lot of automation. It would take a level of techne that still very much resides only in science fiction before such a move would be possible, and you'd face fierce opposition from the rich, who have the means to fight you every step of the way.

And we would all be able to have more 'stuff' as things would cost very little.

This already happens; it's just too slow for most of us to notice because we're so attuned to computing advancements, which happen quite rapidly. Most products either get cheaper over time or stay the same price while improving their specs. Inflation also must be taken into account. The process takes decades, but a lot of these items are durable goods, so it's not as slow as it sounds.

What about recycling? Or imagination? As long as we have endless power from the sun, we can support lots of activity on Earth. I'm all for space habitats -- but why not just build them directly, rather than mess around with more "exploration" instead of actually building habitats that we knew how to build in the 1970s (Gerry O'Neill)?

With 3D printing and robots, work can be free and cheap -- in fact, that is a major crisis right now with the jobless recovery as trends in automation and better design are leading to widespread structural unemployment, that given limited demand by healthy humans for more stuff, means an end to mainstream economic cycles.

Here is an alternative:
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."
"""

I see the top post (my first) got modded down to zero, likely by pro-space people. Why are technologists often so blind to thinking through the implications of all the technology they are making? School is no doubt part of it. We need to use what we have to build a better world right here and right now, and then there will be lots of resources for space exploration and many other things. NASA and the space community have had a lot of good ideas already. Let's try using some of them to make the Earth a better place that works for everyone:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

Wikipedia only took about US$2 million to get to critical mass. A technology library (would probably be much more than a website) might only cost US$100 million or so to get to such a critical mass.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72fde8fa2a33ded8
"""
So, to recap, there are a few paths to go down, ideally in parallel:
* fund a specific hardware project like Factor-e-farm, CubeSpawn, RepRap or whatever, hoping to push it along specifically (or maybe several);
* fund a specific simulation project like Second Life or some massive multi-player game that connects to open manufacturing, where people are creating 3D models that work in that world (or maybe several);
* fund new software tools that make open design easier for everyone;
* fund some sort of integration service, seen socially as the Wikipedia of open manufacturing, whatever that would look like whether it had a wiki aspect or not, like, Appropedia, SKDB, NIST's SLIM, my attempts at OSCOMAK/PointrelSemanticDesktop, or whatever, which defined a standard way to encode manufacturing recipes and licenses so everything interlinked and could be analyzed and visualized somehow (like to tease out the minimal self-replicating system that met some criterion);

For a society where different rules apply, see:
    "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
    http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"""
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an in. situation. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger in. creases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
    The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.
"""

Economics does not say everything is scarce. It says it is a discipline about decision making about scarcity. And it is woefully incomplete because it does not really concern itself with creating abundance. Most economics textbooks probably don't even mention abundance. Or fun. Or community. It's a woefully inadequate way to look at the world if what you want to do is build abundant fun communities.

How do you get from "if there is a cost" to "the resource is scarce". Things can be really cheap.

Also, consider what Marshall Brain says here:
    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."
"""

Again, if you look at how people lived for tens of thousands of years in pre-scarcity times (before agriculture was needed), then you will see people can live without elites of the nature we have now. Daniel Quinn talks about this too.

You should read Manna; it's precisely about this.

Except you completely ignore externalities, systemic risks, and equity, which is what got us in various messes already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Consider the "True cost" of oil from various perspectives:
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
"""
Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel. That would make the "real" cost of filling up a family sedan about $220, and filling up a large SUV about $325 (when oil was $10 a barrel cheaper than it is now!).
"""

By the way, I've read it takes as much *electricity* to produce a gallon of gas as it would take an electric car to go about the same distance. So, all the external costs of gasoline are totally for nothing energywise.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"

Depending on other regions for energy creates a systemic risk. Pipelines are inherently indefensible and so require a police state to protect because one small group could do vast damage to the society by damaging just one oil pipeline. Solar panels on your roof do not require a police state to protect, just regular police; if someone vandalizes them, the entire economy does not collapse.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a few who control oil companies also creates a wealth dispartity that damages democracy as well as the economy (because few can start small businesses without loans or investments from big organizations). One reason we have oil pipelines instead of solar panels everywhere is that it has been more profitable to a few people to do that, while the rest of us pay huge taxes for a military to defend those pipelines at home and abroad.

I could go on, but basically, you need to look at issues like externalities, systemic risks, and concentration of wealth to see the various ways that markets can and do fail regularly in practice unless they are taxed and regulated. Taxes and regulation have their problems too, of course:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Ideally, we need to move beyond markets and rationing for most things. So, your enthusiasm is great. You're right that cheap energy would help with a lot of things (as long as it was also relatively clean, inherently safe, and long lasting -- like wind and solar and many other renewables). Ideally, we want an energy infrastructure that is inherently secure, not brittle and requiring now about a trillion dollars a year to secure extrinsically with soldiers and bombs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Still, if all the benefits of cheap energy or any other major innovation go to a few people, then we just have another problem. See Marshall Brain's short story on this:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

You're right that a left that focuses on rationing and scarcity is dysfunctional; that has historically b

Louis Kelso's idea of a basic income removes the need for many job protections. A basic income almost passed under Richard Nixon, promoted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.basicincome.com/
http://www.michaeljournal.org/lesson1.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan

One is being put in place in Brazil:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=974
"""
A senator from Brazil, Suplicy was the sponsor of the "Citizen's Basic Income" legislation that was signed into law last year. The law is grounded in the concept that an unconditional and guaranteed minimum income is the simplest and most effective step toward the eradication of poverty. It will be implemented gradually in Brazil beginning this year."
    He said today: "All people -- regardless of their ethnicity, gender, whatever -- should be able to share in the wealth of the nation. This should be done in a way that is just and provides for dignity and real freedom. Ensuring a guaranteed unconditional income does several things: It ends bureaucracy of reporting and checking on people. It eliminates the stigma attached to getting resources from the government. It does not penalize someone for earning money from a job. And it removes uncertainty."
"""

Lots of jobs don't require much literacy, which is one reason schools are getting worse and worse at teaching basic literacy, even as they still stamp out initiative and creativity in many cases. :-( From John Taylor Gatto:
    http://www.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.
"""

This robot is not very literate, but it will probably eventually take many jobs away:
    http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
"A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!"

We need to rethink many things about our society and economy -- and compulsory schooling is interwoven with the notion of a command economy based on rationing and a scarcity-mindset. We need post-scarcity education to go with a post-scarcity economy. A related sci-fi story by Marshall Brain:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

One anecdote about a person on welfare (possibly burned out or damaged from the current economic system or schooling) does not a case make.

You said previously that another person's vast wealth does not bother you unless it affected your ability to make a living. I then gave a list of things from campaign donations through advertising and getting multiple chances that suggests a vast wealth disparity would impact your ability to make money. And that's even without considering how many workers can be replaced by increasing automation (including robots and AI) and better design. Then you changed the subject. :-)

In an age of robots, an "L-Curve" society can't function if the only reason people have a right to consume is having a job.
    http://www.lcurve.org/

The global economy has just crashed (or rather, is *starting* to crash in a big way). You are suggesting the same mainstream economists who defended it's current structure know how to fix it? Give examples of these people who are so effective at governing countries? The USA is second from last in child wellbeing of industrialized countries, and that is only because the UK is last as (it's said) a poor version of the USA. So, how about, say, Iceland as a model, a big neo-conservative poster child for a time as a well run economy? Markets have a lot of good points, but they often fail at dealing with positive and negative externalities, managing systemic risk of market failure, and equitable distribution of market production if the economic wealth distribution is very unequal. I stuck in "humane" is "markets need a wide spread of wealth to function humanely", but the fact is more like, they need a broad distribution of wealth to function at all (as we are seeing now). Why did the USA have so much economic growth when top tax rates were around 94%? Because it spread the wealth around. There is a law of diminishing return on great wealth, where it just becomes easier to park your wealth in Treasury bills and finance wars than actually run businesses.

From Marshall Brain's "Manna":
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV -- the world's best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived -- he had had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it."

I've become more and more enamored of the idea of a "basic income" which would be essentially extending Social Security in the USA to everyone in the country (and eventually globally) regardless of need or age. The same for Medicare. It seems to me that is an easy first step for a market system to continue to function, and after that we will likely see further transformations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.usbig.net/

It's heartening to think the US Congress almost passed one under Richard Nixon. So it is not like the idea is politically impossible. And several other countries and communities have been experimenting with it recently.

A simple equation:

Jobs = (Demand - (Stockpiled_Supply - War)) / (Automation * Good_Design)

We can assume "Automation" and "Good_Design" are increasing, which tends to reduce the need for "Jobs", all other things being equal. Mainstream economics suggests "Demand" is essentially infinite -- that is, if people have two cars, they want four cars, and if they have four cars, they want one hundred cars parked in their driveway, and then even that won't be enough, they will want a thousand cars, a million cars. Clearly, stated that way, mainstream economics sounds absurd, because people only have so much time and attention they will devote to acquiring cars. So, if "Demand" is ultimately limited once most people meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, information, and some consumer items ("the best things in life are free or cheap"), or at least "Demand" is rising less quickly than improvements in productivity "(Automation * Good_Design)", then the number of paying "Jobs" will go towards zero. And as there are less "Jobs", and so more competition for them, the remaining "Jobs" will get paid less and have worse working conditions.

The absence of good "Jobs" creates a crisis in a society that only allows people with jobs to direct the market and take goods from it (thus, the unemployed will starve, or riot, or be on unrelated small and depressing welfare payments, see Marshall Brain's Manna or described in the Triple Revolution memorandum).
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

"War" can increase jobs by destroying any stockpiled goods or existing infrastructure, requiring more goods and infrastructure, or vast stockpiles of military might intended no never be used, but "War" has become too terrible to contemplate even as stockpiles of war materials beg to be used, and in any case, building a *need* for "War" into an economic system seems inelegant and unethical, especially when "War" can so easily mean Armageddon these days.

The above is the equation I would suggest is more worth exploring these days than the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" one. That simple equation is IMHO key to understanding the next twenty years of our society, especially with the emergence of more capable robots. It would be worthwhile to plot the number of jobs over time for all sorts of assumptions of curves of demand and curves of automation and better design. One could also add in some demographic aspects of changing population sizes which I have left out for simplicity, as well ais issues of how well the market economy is functioning in terms of currency flows and hording and inflation/deflation. Remember, in the next twenty years, none of the resource constraints Peak Oilers worry about are likely to be huge, but nonetheless, the equation above might show jobs trending low enough to create

I've become more and more enamored of the idea of a "basic income" which would be essentially extending Social Security in the USA to everyone in the country (and eventually globally) regardless of need or age. The same for Medicare. It seems to me that is an easy first step for a market system to continue to function, and after that we will likely see further transformations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.usbig.net/

It's heartening to think the US Congress almost passed one under Richard Nixon. So it is not like the idea is politically impossible. And several other countries and communities have been experimenting with it recently.

A simple equation:

Jobs = (Demand - (Stockpiled_Supply - War)) / (Automation * Good_Design)

We can assume "Automation" and "Good_Design" are increasing, which tends to reduce the need for "Jobs", all other things being equal. Mainstream economics suggests "Demand" is essentially infinite -- that is, if people have two cars, they want four cars, and if they have four cars, they want one hundred cars parked in their driveway, and then even that won't be enough, they will want a thousand cars, a million cars. Clearly, stated that way, mainstream economics sounds absurd, because people only have so much time and attention they will devote to acquiring cars. So, if "Demand" is ultimately limited once most people meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, information, and some consumer items ("the best things in life are free or cheap"), or at least "Demand" is rising less quickly than improvements in productivity "(Automation * Good_Design)", then the number of paying "Jobs" will go towards zero. And as there are less "Jobs", and so more competition for them, the remaining "Jobs" will get paid less and have worse working conditions.

The absence of good "Jobs" creates a crisis in a society that only allows people with jobs to direct the market and take goods from it (thus, the unemployed will starve, or riot, or be on unrelated small and depressing welfare payments, see Marshall Brain's Manna or described in the Triple Revolution memorandum).
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

"War" can increase jobs by destroying any stockpiled goods or existing infrastructure, requiring more goods and infrastructure, or vast stockpiles of military might intended no never be used, but "War" has become too terrible to contemplate even as stockpiles of war materials beg to be used, and in any case, building a *need* for "War" into an economic system seems inelegant and unethical, especially when "War" can so easily mean Armageddon these days.

The above is the equation I would suggest is more worth exploring these days than the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" one. That simple equation is IMHO key to understanding the next twenty years of our society, especially with the emergence of more capable robots. It would be worthwhile to plot the number of jobs over time for all sorts of assumptions of curves of demand and curves of automation and better design. One could also add in some demographic aspects of changing population sizes which I have left out for simplicity, as well ais issues of how well the market economy is functioning in terms of currency flows and hording and inflation/deflation. Remember, in the next twenty years, none of the resource constraints Peak Oilers worry about are likely to be huge, but nonetheless, the equation above might show jobs trending low enough to create

The cautionary tale of Manna

I like this thing by How Stuff Work's Marshall Brain, Robotic Nation. Even without AI, robots are putting humans out of work at an alarming rate. The problem is that instead of creating new jobs, the government is building more jail cells ;) If you look around, he also has a pretty good idea for a world where humans do what they want creatively while the robots give us all the necessities. It would be easy to pooh pooh it as "communism" but it's more creative capitalism. You see, if we didn't need food, shelter, medical care and we didn't need to work for it (as we are getting to very rapidly in the U.S., where the majority of people are not doing any real "work"), then we can all have pretty much a permanent vacation. So everyone would be on a fixed income that is equal to the GDP of the robot workers divided by the population. But you can choose to spend your fixed income on anything you want. You want to save it up and spend it all at once on a big house, sure. You want to save it up and lend it out to others? Sure! It's just capitalism without the whole struggle for survival. In this day and age we are getting very close to that. You can lose everything and you don't have to worry about starving, staying somewhere, etc. There is welfare, shelters, etc. With robots, all of that stuff can be made as luxurious as any McMansion you're working your ass off for now for only the cost of the energy. With solar power and a collective power grid that nobody owns (we share it), the sun's energy is turned into products that everyone gets to share equally. As long as the initial concentration is on necessities, everyone will have total freedom to live how they want, to accumulate wealth, to consume, while not having to work. It's either that or government prisions so I think we as a people need to get involved in making this something that benefits society rather than only the super rich. Money doesn't mean much anymore people, wake up, these robots are our opportunity to have a permanent vacation.

A while back in a similar thread there was a link to a story about what happens when artificial intelligence can perform menial tasks, I thought it was quite profound.

It's a bit long but here it is: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

It is interesting you should raise that issue, since the historic problems of the Middle East are a prime example of post-scarcity technology wielded for scarcity ends and creating endless disasters. Powerful (potentially post-scarcity) social bureaucracies like Britain and the United Nations were used by scarcity-oriented thinkers to carve up that section of the world into arbitrary parcels with little attention to the local history and inevitable conflicts, mainly for scarcity-oriented reasons (narrowly selfish for the politicians or narrowly selfish for the states).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Middle_East

Imagine, say, Israel as a place where anyone could move from anywhere in the world, regardless of ethnicity, genetics, or religion, and receive a guaranteed basic income of US$1000 a month. Something like that using advanced technology is envisioned for Australia by Marshall Brain here (towards the end):
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
How much fighting would there have been in the Middle East then?

I agree people can have a sentimental and historical attachment to the land, and that can often be a good thing, but as far as land itself goes, we know enough now to build cities in the oceans.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_island
And even space:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill

The way the brain works makes such experiences nearly impossible to encode and certainly impossible with drugs, as another poster pointed out. If we take "drugs" to include "nanomachines targeting the brain and disguised as a pill" then we enter the realm of the merely highly improbable. The machines would have to collectively be smart enough to override signals from and to the body while simultaneously generating the desired experience.

Another possibility would be a single device at the top of the spinal column and networked with lots of processing power, like a wireless Matrix or the Vertebrane system from Manna. This too requires advanced nanotech to implant, as it must splice every nerve in the spinal column plus the optic and aural nerves, and so is also highly improbable to occur at all, and certainly not for nearly a hundred years unless the Singularity frea--er, folks are right.

Given all that, the experiences you speak of (flying, fighting a dragon) could happen, but doing the "I know kung-fu!" thing is impossible due to the nature of consciousness. If you want to learn something, you're going to have to spend the time to learn it. Reshaping synapse connections and brainwave patterns to implant memories requires godlike knowledge of the individual's brain state and history. Let's not forget that we are messy meat machines (if machines we are) whose sense of self and memory is only infinitesimally less mysterious now as it has always been. Faking an external world and letting the brain experience it, hard as it is, is orders of magnitude simpler than fabricating a past experience, especially an intellectual one such as memorizing the LOC, out of whole cloth.

Sorry I'm such a party pooper =(

Although it is tempting to say that in a perfect world without greed much more would be accomplished, one has to consider what the incentives are. In theory, capitalism encourages innovation by providing rewards for it. In a system where no one has to work, many won't. Of course, it is unclear this is a bad thing: many people unable to do what they want in a capitalistic system may decide to be artists or scientists if they do not have to worry about making money.

Just looking at the computer field, it seems like things would be better for everyone if all the software around were available for free, but it is not clear it would have been written in the first place. It is sometimes argued that a lot of the popular Linux programs and desktop environments do a lot of copying from Windows/Mac. If there were not people needing to make a living working on these UI projects, would they have ever gotten done? Microsoft and Apple had strong incentives to bring the personal computer to the masses. Would an alternative economic system offer the same incentives? Should it?

As for alternative systems, you may be interested to read about Social Credit which I first saw discussed in Robert Heinlein's series of essays^W^W^Wutopian novel For Us, The Living. Another alternative system is discussed in Marshall Brain's work Manna (available online) where abundance (and robot laborers) organized by a company founded for social good creates a utopia where each person gets a daily allowance of production credits.

On the more realistic and immediately implementable end of things, there's Why Work? ("CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery"), a website dedicated to not having a job [that you don't like].

I put a reference to your insightful comment on the "open manufacturing" mailing list:
    "Forfeiting plumbing for self-determination?"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/8462e40751be6966#

What I found interesting in the comment and reply is the perceived tension between relying on (centralized?) manufacturing and freedom.

Anyway, it seems to be the general feeling of slashdot that there is no land one can go to right now to escape these trends (other than perhaps the future. :-)

David Brin suggests in his transparent society that the only alternative to one-way surveillance is for everyone to be able to inspect all surveillance:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

In the "utopia" at the end of Marshall Brain's Manna story, there was no anonymity and effectively probably no privacy:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
But that is sort-of like Brin's Transparent Society idea.

Another post in this Slashdot discussion makes the point that "Freedom" and "Justice" are not the same thing as "Democracy" (even if they often may go together). One can wonder if "Privacy" is orthogonal to those as well? Have so many things changed that privacy is indeed history? On the other hand, in the short story "The Skills of Xanadu", which is another open manufacturing utopia, people had total privacy even in plain sight when they wanted it, out of social conventions and a form of computer-mediated telepathy.
    "RE:The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/13e85ebf99d0554f

In any case, another implication of your comment is that, for many people, the conceptual goal for open manufacturing in a free society may not need be as high as producing everything we have now (even indoor plumbing?). Just producing enough to support a reasonably free and sustainable society may be a good enough first goal? Anyway, there are bound to be a diversity of opinions on that; I'm just drawing together some themes.

I remain convinced, along the lines of Manuel de Landa, that there is *no* possibility of choice between hierarchy and meshwork, because all systems have both aspects. One can at best talk about balances between the
centralized hierarchies and grassroots meshworks in different situations.
    "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

What happens when McDonalds is staffed by robots?

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

See also:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

A key idea of free and open source technologies is that they are ultimately so much better and easier to maintain, that if only one person in a thousand feels like contributing (say, with Debian), that makes more than enough productivity to support everyone.

But what about all the "slackers" who will consume without giving back? The answer is just, "So what?" Why not have pity on such people who are stuck in such an embarrassingly juvenile state of mind?

If a few can supply the many, then, so what of the slackers? Who cares? Why build a whole mythology around slackers? And surprisingly, there may be less slackers than one might expect, because when you have the freedom to make things your way, without a "boss", there is often a lot of fun to be had in making things. Just look at all the kids making free music for the internet these days. Or people writing web pages. :-)

Examples like the Israeli Kibbutzim have already shown in the past that even with hard manual labor, there are always a bunch of schmucks (like maybe even myself and my wife, or many others already working in non-profits :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
who are willing to work hard even with apparent slackers in their face. Sure, Kibbutzim had problems with slackers, but modern automated robotic technology changes the nature of that situation:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robot
(and without bringing in migrant laborers to exploit and expose to pesticides). And how hard can it be to sit in your GPS-driven air-conditioned tractor and listen to free music? Or even make some more music of your own in between keeping an eye on how the robots are doing?

We're may be about to see an entire change *back* to the way things used to be.

This is the world the prospective college student is probably imagining these days as in their future -- or will be soon. :-) Robot tractors. Free music. GNU/Linux everywhere. Slackers who only take stuff and don't make stuff as being "so junior high" or "so nursing home". Essentially, these kids are imagining (or will soon) a John Lennon "Imagine" sort of world -- with abundance and security for all. With robot tractors able to get higher yields from less land and less water through precision farming, why fight so much about the agricultural fields or river water? With nanotech solar panels and nanotech near-perfect insulation, why fight about the oil fields?

Here is part of a sci-fi story about the flip side of that "Imagine" world kids are thinking about, where it all goes horribly wrong, say, with a Stanford-led elite unable to let go of a fear of scarcity, and instead using the robots to guard most of the world who are kept in "welfare" prison camps:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm

"Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried it twice.

To me, "post-scarcity" means the end of rationing the basics for everybody, where wha

Manna

Marshall Brain has an interesting proposal.

My comments almost three years ago on the Shuttleworth foundation also trying to reform schools, and applicable here:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26#comment-397

Also, a related essay I wrote:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools.
Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving
compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the
information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch
this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory
schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

Gates' initiatives for small schools are probably just more of the same, to make digital slave laborers. Even the more radical reform in the news still puts the emphasis is still on making kids fit into the needs of business:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html

At least Shuttleworth's initiatives are trying to empower kids, but that group too can't get past seeing schooling as the solution, instead of realizing it is a big part of the problem disempowering the next generation.

In twenty to thirty years computers will be about another million times faster, and we'll have better 3D printers and smarter dexterous seeing robots, and most humans just won't be employable in any sense we now understand. A previous related post by me to Slashdot on computing and education and the mindset of the class of 2029:
"Ignores the big picture on exponential computing
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279703&cid=20354965

Marshall Brain on that theme:
"Manna"
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A bigger generalization on that theme by me:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year, in general on this:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
A lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out of this intellectual proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient
-- Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History

Two Social Revolutions Become One

Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?

As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom y

Have you read the story by Marshall Brain called "Story of Manna".

Here's the link. It's as you say, but in a fiction story, buy oh soo true.

It reminded me of Robotic nation and the "Manna"story on that site.

Now, the writing isn't the world's best and the scenarios simplistic, but it's quite an interesting,plausible and scary thought experiment. The robots from TFA would fit into that world very nicely

Marshall Brain has taken a much wider view of how robots will affect the future. By the time Templeton's Robo-cars come about, transportation will only be facet of a very major impact on the human race.

"Terry Pratchett is an economical retard. In that book he states that an eternal and free energy/labor supply equates to poverty for everyone."

Well, it does, in our current market- and employment-based economy. Marshall Brain makes essentially the same point in his 'Robot Freedom' essays: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

That doesn't mean massive automation is a bad thing. What it does mean is that to cope with the existence of such automation, we will need to transition our economy from one where 'you don't eat unless you don't work / sell / finance others' labour', to a guaranteed Universal Basic Income system where you get 'credit' for goods and services simply based on being a living human.

And to most Americans, that transition sounds like the worst kind of SOCIALISM.

Even to those who aren't ideologically predisposed to knee-jerk hatred of a communical resource-sharing society not driven by private fear and greed, there are some very curly issues involved based around the fact that we simply haven't yet deployed such a system on a wide scale.

It's sort of like the 'second system effect' in programming: we can see that the current economy is horribly broken and crashes regularly and kills people, but it is a patchwork of both bugs and bug-fixes. Starting from scratch with a whole new concept is attractive, but is likely to crash even harder if we don't work out the bugs first in small systems.

It doesn't help that the most widely publicised Economy 2.0, Marxist-Lenist Communism, was a collossal social and environmental disaster. It gives the false impression that 'there is no alternative' to the present system.

I'm hopeful the Free / Open Source Software movement is the first step toward demonstrating that an 'economy of abundance' is at least *conceivable*, but it's a long way from showing how the same principles could organise, for example, a supermarket.

Making the transition *without* invoking bloody revolution, as the Communists tried, and without destabilising the entire house of cards that is our present what-passes-for-an-economy, is going to be the tricky bit.

Implementing robots will result in a massive unemployment epidemic. See this article by Marshall Brian, the creator of How Stuff Works.

You MUST take into account sociological factors when you're talking about a major robotic influx. The bottom line is that our economy is set up to use human labor right now. If there is not something in place to help people continue to work, perhaps at a lower rate (such as a 20 hour workweek limit, or something), all of the money will just flow up into the top 10% like it has been. It has to be on our terms, not the gigantic companies. Cargill already uses robotically controlled tractors to harvest the fields. But is it giving me, the average American, any additionaly leisure time? No.

The opportunity is such that we can either have a permanent vacation, and the robots allow us to flower and flourish culturally, or it will be permanent enslavement and povery since the upper classes no longer have a use for us workers.

And that was the problem with Marxism. Someone had to do the work, and they wanted to get more if they did more of their fair share. Well, if robots are doing the work, why can't we as a people collectively own them, and collectively enjoy the fruits of their labors; food, housing, etc. Granted some of those top 10% people will have to give up some of their power and come down to our level, but in this world of robots, any luxury can be had for almost nothing.

Marshall Brain wrote a novel about it called Manna.

If we had a real plan NOW to build a society of leisure based on robots that no one owns, I think it could be accomplished in a few decades. It would involve the formation of a large non-profit stock company where we all buy shares to get this thing built. It's not going to be totally simple, but it will be worth it.

Implementing robots will result in a massive unemployment epidemic. See this article by Marshall Brian, the creator of How Stuff Works.

You MUST take into account sociological factors when you're talking about a major robotic influx. The bottom line is that our economy is set up to use human labor right now. If there is not something in place to help people continue to work, perhaps at a lower rate (such as a 20 hour workweek limit, or something), all of the money will just flow up into the top 10% like it has been. It has to be on our terms, not the gigantic companies. Cargill already uses robotically controlled tractors to harvest the fields. But is it giving me, the average American, any additionaly leisure time? No.

The opportunity is such that we can either have a permanent vacation, and the robots allow us to flower and flourish culturally, or it will be permanent enslavement and povery since the upper classes no longer have a use for us workers.

And that was the problem with Marxism. Someone had to do the work, and they wanted to get more if they did more of their fair share. Well, if robots are doing the work, why can't we as a people collectively own them, and collectively enjoy the fruits of their labors; food, housing, etc. Granted some of those top 10% people will have to give up some of their power and come down to our level, but in this world of robots, any luxury can be had for almost nothing.

Marshall Brain wrote a novel about it called Manna.

If we had a real plan NOW to build a society of leisure based on robots that no one owns, I think it could be accomplished in a few decades. It would involve the formation of a large non-profit stock company where we all buy shares to get this thing built. It's not going to be totally simple, but it will be worth it.