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Mistrust is expensive. That's how I've heard it put elsewhere. And just look at unstable areas of the world to see that. More and more money goes into guarding (e.g. armed guards, steel walls and window shutters, armored cars, constant surveillance) and less and less into producing stuff worth guarding. In the same way that the natural ecology provide many vital services to the global economy (like air and water recycling), peace and general satisfaction saves us a lot of money (not just military expenses but day to day costs ranging from locks to insurance premiums).

Although, there are always some who see profit in causing unrest of all sorts -- thus "War is a Racket". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

See also "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

And, for some humor on this, the "Bee Watcher Watcher" story by Dr. Seuss:
http://www.drseussart.com/illu...

In general, I agree the best way to prevent disasters is to have happier citizens (and healthier, more capable, and more optimistic ones). A basic income for the exchange economy may be one way towards happier citizens (and with a BI people on the edge have more to lose by criminal actions, too), but so could be an improved gift economy, improved subsistence technologies like 3D printing, and/or improved government planning through better democratic participation. I discuss those here and why they are a better answer to mass unemployment compared to other options:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...

AC wrote: "If all people were that smart and all of them qualified for $800.000 jobs who would clean out the sewers and clean the floors?"

See also, by Bob Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...

Or "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon.

Personally, my own life would be little different -- except for a big change of not engaging in bouts of unrelated paid employment for expenses. I'd still spend time with my kid and homeschool. I'd still work on free software like the Pointrel system or software related to my wife's free book. I'd still work towards organizing all manufacturing knowledge (OSCOMAK) and work towards designing self-replicating space habitats. I'd hopefully be doing all those software and hardware things a lot better and a lot faster because I'd have more time (without taking on unrelated employment, even as I'd still be happy to help out on other projects just to be helpful and exchange ideas, same as helping any neighbor). I'd probably have lab space for physical experiments which would also speed things up. Another speed boost would (hopefully) be lots of like minded peers who were free to do similar things who I could collaborate with -- including on simulating and building and running free automated tire production factories as I posted on yesterday, especially since people will probably still need tires, even in space habitats: :-)
"Automated FOSS tire plant ideas; simulation tools? "
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I'd probably feel less compelled to do those things quickly though, so I might do more gardening. I'd still help out with my local historical society.

I think most people could find interesting things to do. It might take some period of "deworking" to make the transition. For kids leaving public school to do "unschooling" (or even just plain homeschooling) a rule of thumb is that it takes at least one month for every month in school to make a transition to independent learning. So, for someone who has worked at a conventional job for a dozen years on top of a dozen years of schooling, it might take a couple years for him or her to start to regain some independent initiative.

I feel it likely a lot of people would just have the time to be better parents, better friends, better neighbors, and better family members. As Bob Black wrote in his essay on "The Abolition of Work":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!" "

Is it any wonder you want to avoid such desperate people? Even if most of them are doing a heroic job of trying to hold everything together despite limited time? And the flip side of it is, the people in the USA with lots of spare time, they tend to either be those who are (inherited) wealthy parasites who accept or ignore the huge rich/poor divide or they are people who are poor or old/tired or disabled or mentally ill. Obviously, I'm exaggerating here -- but not by that much. People in Western Europe are more likely to have free time and be able to use it to be better companions and more involved citizens and volunteers.
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/...
http://newint.org/features/201...

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik... "Guinan was the mysterious bartender in Ten Forward, the lounge aboard the USS Enterprise-D. She was well known for her wise counsel, which had proven invaluable many times. She was an El-Aurian, a race of "listeners" who were scattered by the Borg. Q, however, once suggested that there is far more to her than could be imagined. "

Or consider Vincent's sometimes influential role in Eureka's Cafe Diem:
http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/C...
"Cafe Diem is the cafe of Vincent, on the main street of Eureka. It's the place where everybody meets to eat one of Vincent's extraordinary meals or have a cup of his signature "Vinspresso". "

James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" provides other examples of why some people wait tables in a gift economy -- even when robots could easily do it.

Also, in a post-scarcity future many undesirable aspects of any tasks can be engineered out. Tables might be built of materials that were easy to clean. Cleaning cloths might be super-absorbent. You might wear technology that made taking orders easy. You boosted immune system would make catching disease from a diner unlikely. And so on...

See Bob Black on this:
https://www.whywork.org/rethin...
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "

Or listen to or read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
https://books.google.com/books...

Why do people host dinner parties for friends when they involve "work"?

Why do people knit when they can buy machine-woven cloth for less than that of the raw yarn?

In some ways, waiting tables and preparing food are far more important jobs than most of what most people do for "paid" work these days... As Bob Black wrote in the above-linked essay:
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess b

"After all, that's what happened to virtually everybody else on Earth. Do you ever wonder why you have to work five days a week, until you're 67, and then you die within a few years of retirement? Who claims to own all the land in your country? When somebody sells a piece of land, how did they claim to own it in the first place? The people of the rainforest are being forced off their OWN land, where they have lived for tens of thousands of years, to be turned into wage slaves, working in factories. Wake up."

Insightful. It has been suggested the "Garden of Eden" story is really about the painful transition from hunting/gathering by tribes to agriculture managed by militaristic bureaucracies. Several groups of people have similar stories, some fairly recently as they were forced to convert to agriculture by being pushed off their native lands. This happened also in England with the "Enclosure acts".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Various pushed to "privatization" in the USA are the same old thing... And it is expanding to water rights, spectrum rights, endless copyrights, overly broad patents, and so on...

Related:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

And the amazing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sle...
"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Daniel Everett arrived among the Piraha with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Piraha have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics. Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, Everett's life-changing tale is riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself."

Howard Zinn wrote about what parts of America were like before Columbus began the conquest (backed by profiteering organizations run for "the love of money"):
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim

"I hope someone else remembers this article and still has the link?"

Related, By Bob Black from 1985: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

I have a list of alternatives collected here, some positive like a basic income or a gift economy, some negative like more prisons, more schooling, and more war: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

... due to the law of diminishing returns... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

H1Bs directly reduce wages of technical employees, plus they also displace local contractors who otherwise get much higher hourly rates than employees generally due to the short term nature of the projects and higher skill levels and so on. Even if there is not a lump of labor, there is such a thing as a fixed budget at any point in time.

The US created just about zero net new jobs in the last decade while the population and the GDP grew. So, output is increasing in a 21st century economy while labor stays fixed or declines as a percent of the population.

On top of that, it doesn't matter how much labor is needed if it can be done more cheaply by robots and AIs. And before such replace human workers entirely, they will let a few workers do the work of many, thus increasing unemployment,

There are many possible "solutions" to this situation being tried, which I catalog here:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...

The real future of work is to make it play and pleasant. See Bob Black and EF Schumacher:

Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."

Schumacher: http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

The 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon depicts a society powered by mobile computing that has realized both these objectives (especially the first).
http://books.google.com/books?...
https://archive.org/details/pr...

For some comic relief see also the 1950s story "The Midas Plague" where only the very wealthy were allowed to have full-time jobs and work overtime and live in small homes, while everyone else was limited to part-time jobs as best or unemployment and forced consumption of mansions and massive amounts of food and consumer goods at worst..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

So much of the discussion on this topic ignores that some people like working around plants in agriculture, or like building things with machine tools, or like working with heavy equipment, and so on. Granted, they may not like their boss, or may not like being overworked, or may not like low pay. To suggest such people become programmers (or nail salon workers or whatever) ignores that a lot of a person's life satisfaction may come from doing work they love. I love programming and think it is a useful thing for many people to know, but I accept most people may not like to do a lot of programming, say if they like working outdoors or like working with people or plants or visibly moving machines. It is a deep flaw in our current discussions to ignore the potential positive value of meaningful work in someone's life and just focus on getting people to do work they may not like 40 hours a week so they can get a paycheck to buy stuff, raise a family, and maybe have a hobby they enjoy in their remaining time. "Work" can be better than that.

Two essays on that, one by EF Schumacher:
http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

And one by Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."

Still, with more and more AI and robotics, there will be less and less jobs where it makes sense to pay a human to do them. So, we need a mix of a "basic income" for the exchange economy, an expanded volunteer/gift economy, improved local subsistence via 3D printing, solar panels, cold fusion, and agricultural robotics, and improved democratic participatory planning at all levels of government. Then at least parents will be able to spend more time raising their kids well, a job that can take about as much time and energy as most people can put into it, especially if you forgo institutionalizing kids from an early age in prison-like compulsory schools. More ideas on this:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...

AC wrote: "Some jobs are not possible to do with a never-ending flow of interns and indian mechanical turks. For some tasks you need dependable people who have years of insight into the business model of your company and who have the kind of intimate knowledge of your IT infrastructure that takes years to acrue."

This is so true. There is a lot of "domain knowledge" in many fields, even if the underlying programming issues may often be the same (how to write and maintain good code as part of a team). If you only know one or the other, it is hard to do the job well. And it takes time to learn both.

And a big danger for new people is they don't know what they don't know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FourLev...
http://processcoaching.com/fou...

And for someone who has gone up the learning curve on both domain knowledge and technical & teamwork knowledge, it may take increasing or new challenges to keep things interesting. For whatever personal reasons, some people care more about certain problem domains at some moment than others. See Dan Pink on how the biggest motivation to do good work comes from a combination of purpose, mastery, and challenge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Game psychology suggests a sense of "flow" is best achieved by matching the challenge to be only slightly more than the skill level:
http://www.jenovachen.com/flow...

On making work into play, Bob Black write about this in 1985 in The Abolition of Work", and Theodore Sturgeon in the 1950s in "The Skills of Xanadu":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://books.google.com/books?...

Although E.F. Schumacher made a good point here too:
http://centerforneweconomics.o...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

There is some tension between Schumacher's point and Black's point, so resolving it may take a deeper level of analysis.

"Our society has become massively automated compared to the middle ages. And we have 25 times the world population now. Yet we still have plenty of jobs; I'd wager that employment as a percentage is much higher today. This seems to contradict the idea that we will ever come to a point that automation will reduce jobs permanently."

See Bob Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

On the other hand, we all need to do meaningful things. That includes for many people having time to be a good parent, friend, neighbor, volunteer, or citizen -- something ignored by an emphasis on paid labor. There are at least five major types of economic transaction: subsistence, gift, exchange, panned, and theft; the issue is the balance between them for a particular civilization.

See also E.F. Schumacher' essay "Buddhist Economics" for another take on things:
http://neweconomy.net/publicat...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

Consider, for example, this point by an AC in another article from today on why engineers go into management:
http://developers.slashdot.org...
"Most of us who love engineering, find it impossible to love our work (extreme time pressure, a 600% workload, often having to abandon/throw away things you love... kinda kills any enthusiasm for the next thing management tells you to do). Management comes as a relief, and you can enjoy coding on your free time."

Consider how true motivation for intellectual tasks comes from a combination of challenge, mastery, and purpose, as Dan Pink says:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The thing that makes many jobs unpleasant is lack of control over how they are done, lack of resourc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As a software developer, in some ways I think we hit a peak with languages like Smalltalk, Common Lisp / Symbolics, Erlang, and C in the 1980s and an OS / VM architecture like IBM's System 360 and VM (which was in a sense "open source" till the mid 1980s) and things have been sliding backwards ever since. I learned C around 1983 on Unix (VMUTS) running on VM hardware (on an IBM mainframe with two CPUs where typically when I did a compile VMUTS got one CPU and 100 I/O bound users shared the other, giving me ten a second turn around for "hello world"). VisualWorks+ENVY in the late 1980s was just amazing for its times, solving issues in practice that Java and Eclipse in practice still struggles with on 1000X faster hardware. That all could have just gotten less expensive, faster, and grown gradually, and become more (not less) open. See also: "VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future"
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/

The reality is, in the US marketplace, people usually create incompatible "standards" on purpose to gain vendor lock-in, or to make some marketing claim, or to work around some copyright or patent. As with Microsoft in the past, companies may intentionally try to sabotage standards (embrace, extend, destroy) as an example of market failure relating to monopoly and externalities. Still, another reason this happens is that creating new things from (seemingly) scratch can be a lot of fun (even as almost everything is built on layers of past work, including notions of physics).

I'm all for experiment and diversity, and I'm all for plug-in modularity, and I'm all for learning-by-doing including through building systems from the ground-up (e.g. http://www.nand2tetris.org/ ). But, practically speaking, our bigger problem these days is mostly too much software, too many standards, too many programming languages, too many libraries, too many IDEs, too many OSes, too many drivers, too many plugins, and too many applications (all with too much accidental complexity). Instead of having a few comprehensive reliable (and free and open source) systems implemented in the above languages and using a common VM standard, we have many half-made buggy ones. This is not to say those languages above could not be improved or that another addition to them would be bad. It is just that at some point a plethora of half-finished choices is its own kind of oppression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less

See also:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we mana

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Think of Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses getting door after door slammed in their face, or getting laughed at, or challenged. Is that really likely to make them leave their tight knit social circle related to their professed faith? Look what happens to them when they do, by analogy with this Christian missionary who lost his job and family after being deconverted by the tribe he went to "help":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Don.27t_Sleep.2C_There_Are_Snakes:_Life_and_Language_in_the_Amazonian_Jungle
"Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, his belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982, and had lost all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late 90s;[9] when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.[10]"

90% of jobs are probably either useless of harmful these days. There are not enough for everyone as long as people need jobs to get income to survive, absent deeper changes:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

I kind of cringed reading that back and forth on the blog with the recruiters the same way I do when watching a "Yes Men" action. Such narrow challenges rarely address the fundamental deep issues, like I tried to do here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."

Or here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all."

There were some easy answers th

Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg

Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.

Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/

But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.

Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/

There is some truth to what you say, unquestionably. Still, what I am saying reflects actual US policy and the behavior of most US Americans, whatever adages remain around from older generations... Most people in the USA may have heard "you are what you eat", yet most people still eat a lot of empty calories from refined starches and sugars and cruelly-raised nutrient-poor meat. That disconnect seems symptomatic of a bubble to me. And it is reflected in US corporate-shaped policy:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."

There is a history there of decades of efforts by the meat and dairy industry to push the "four food groups" to the detriment of most US Americans, a legacy that still continues even with the USDA food pyramid and later efforts. Better pyramids:
http://www.cellinteractive.com/ucla/center_overview/pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/

Why doesn't every US American know about "the pleasure trap" as an aspect of "you are what you eat"?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

If a lot of people in the country accept such behaviors (similar to accepting pictures of the "Great Leader" everywhere in North Korea and various paranoid and repressive NK policies), then what difference is there? No doubt a lot of North Koreans talk about how free and well-off they are... A lot of TFA is about how North Koreans probably don't know what is really going on... And those who do feel they have little power to act. How is that very different from, say, how people working at Walmart, the USA's biggest private employer, do not unionize because people there fear for their jobs if they do and have been taught that collective social action is bad etc. etc. (or at least not taught that it is good and had most independent initiative schooled out of them)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_union_opposition

Working inside a corporation is how many adults in the US spend most of their waking hours.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as F

http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Many great minds have pondered the question of what to do when and if technology brings society to a point that we no longer need all citizens working to sustain a high standard of living for all. Many more think we're already there. That essay is a good starting point.

:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback), and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it, as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and inherently meaningful:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money

See: "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
"Renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right -- a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong."

Also:
http://www.lucifereffect.com/

Considering all that, it's amazing there are still so many "good cops" out there trying to do a great job.

Too bad the socio-economic system they are charged with upholding is increasingly so broken in so many ways...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/11/19/police-response-to-occupy-wall-street-is-absurd/
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

"We can't have a society at all where everybody expects to be taken care of by some magic of 'past social credit', somebody has to do the actual work of creating the stuff, whatever it means, and it really means organising land labour and capital in the most efficient manner to give the market something that will be profitable enough to keep the lights on."

Tell that to Linus Torvalds and all the Debian GNU/Linux maintainers. Kids should tell that to their parents and adopters too. There are many ways of organizing how things get done based on what values we want to celebrate.

How much "work" does it take to tell robots what to do?
"PR2 Fetches Sandwich from Subway"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp0

The authoritarian USSR you knew is history, and the quasi-authoritarian USA is going much the same way.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

There were zero net new jobs created in the USA in 2000-2010 while population grew and the GDP went up by 30% or so.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comments

People can deny it and fight it all they want. Probably the best they'll accomplish to protect and obsolete old order is wipe out humanity -- I hope we do better than that.

Also, comparative advantage does not apply when there is local unemployment. Who is the "you" you are referring to in trade anyway? The people without jobs who are at the edge economically and socially in the USA? So much of what people think they know about even mainstream economics is bunk. See also, for just one example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_toil
"The paradox of toil is the economic hypothesis that total employment will shrink if everybody wants to work more when "the short-term nominal interest rate is zero and there are deflationary pressures and output contraction".[1] The idea is that total employment will fall when wages, and therefore consumption, are pushed down by the simultaneous efforts of everyone to work more in situations where interest rates are against the zero bound so that rates cannot drop more to increase demand for goods. This is a limited example of the fallacy of composition.[1] where assuming that the increase in production that normally occurs when total labor increases applies in all situations. Put simply, when a recessionary economy is up against the zero bound, having more people seeking work - at lower wages if necessary - can actually reduce the number of jobs due to reduced demand from lower wages."

There are at least four fundamental complementary ways to arrange most work that needs to be done:
* Volunteerism through a gift economy (Wikipedia, Linux, Freecycle)
* Through the exchange market, but softened by transfer payments like a "basic income" (or a more fragmented system like in the USA with social security, public school supports, welfare, unemployment insurance, etc.)
* By local subsistence through advanced technology like 3D printers, personal robotics, solar panels, and similar DIY stuff
* By democratic participatory resource based planning at all levels.

The fact is, neither the USSR nor the USA was talking about "socialism" when they either celebrated it or maligned it. Western Europe is a better example of what "socialism" means. See Chomsky here to see more about the truth about the USSR and the USA and how they played against each other:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA

Lots of alternatives:

"Its a nice rosy thought but we really don't have the unlimited energy you speak of; or if we do we haven't the ability to transport it where we need it and concentrate it enough for many of the applications our society has come to depend on."

"GE: Solar Power Cheaper than Fossil Fuels in 5 years"
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Also, maybe:
"NASA seriously believes in Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)"
http://mnispel.net/neengineer/?p=320
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2832338/posts

And:
http://energyfromthorium.com/

And there are others. Energy is not a big issue if we want to solve that. Lack of imagination, will, and social consensus is more of the problem:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

As well as the diversion of most of our resources into guarding, competition, and war...

As to your quote, I answer it with another quote: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." :-)

Also, who is to judge what "best" is?

Clearly, even third rate is soon going to be enough to create WMDs (like the biotech, nanotech, or microrobotic equivalent of what script kiddies do with computers). So, we still need to figure out a way to make a world that works better and better for more and more people (including by reducing violence through healthier nutrition); see for example:
"Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat: Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime

Also, if the brains of the masses are dulled in the 21st century, it is in large part because the "best" put in place systems to make them that way through compulsory schooling; see John Taylor Gatto's writings:
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?"

How much our resources do you think are currently consumed by guarding, competition, and warfare? I'd suggest over 90%... See for example:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. Ther

I also mention three other aspects that are important too besides a basic income (a gift economy, improved subsistence, and improved planning). More on all that by me:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

If you look at the hard data yourself, you will see that US governments (federal, state, local) together spend about US$600 per month per capita on welfare, unemployment, and schooling. If that money was given directly to every citizen, a family of four would be getting US$2400 per month (tax free) which for many would be enough to live on and homeschool in an area of the country with a low cost of housing (especially as both parents could still do additional work or subsistence gardening activities and would have time to be frugal and would have less stress leading to recreational shopping therapy).
http://www.whywork.org/action/lifestyle/jobfree.html

With more involved parenting, and more neighbors with free time for being involved in their communities, most neighborhoods will be much better place to grow up in, and there will be less juvenile delinquency and fewer kids wanting to act out by hurting others. See also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

The graph you point to, indicating rising government over the next few decades up to about one-half the GDP, is pretty meaningless in the sense that it must depend on a lot of unstated assumptions all subject to political action. Also, some things like health spending may drop greatly as people understand health better; see the links I assembled here:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Besides, what is wrong with redistributing one half the GDP as a basic income (and health insurance)? That would amount to about US$2000 per month as a right of citizenship right now (more if the economy grew more), and to make up for the effective enclosure of the land and of the copyright commons and for pollution suffered from industry and so on. I think that could make a lot of sense, and so do many others:
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.php
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

The remaining half of the GDP would be about as big as the total US GDP around 1995, which seemed big enough to motivate anyone who needed motivating by money back then. :-)

Alaska has something called a Permanent Fund that is somewhat like that (Sarah Palin helped grow it):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

Also, right now the US governments spend more per capita for medical care than other countries require to give all their citizens generally better health care outcomes than in the USA.

So, the numbers easily work out. It is the ideology that is the problem. See:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"Justifications for elites and social hierarchy goes all the way back to the pharaohs. ..."

The fact is, our current socioeconomic system is falling apart (see other links I've posted in this thread) -- and one consequence of that is increased domestic violence and increased warfare. I have collected more details here:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

So, the status quo is failing, and increasingly at risk from WMDs from alienated people. We ne

"There will be no advanced technology building in that society in the long run, it's going to be an economic disaster as fewer and fewer will work, and eventually people will refuse to work for others, all while those, who actually create jobs will obviously move their investments somewhere, where this insane policies will not apply. The economy will be destroyed."

But the economy is already being destroyed by structural unemployment resulting from robotics and other automation; see:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

So, the economy you are talking about defending is already history in that sense.

"People will build viruses and release them just because they will be able to and nothing will prevent them, no amount of wealth in the world will stop them, and the more resources they will have in their hands the more "interesting" experiments they will be able to devise."

The people distributing the viruses were lacking some sort of moral awareness. More wealth in the hands of parents can let them raise their children better. It can allow communities to create more interesting opportunities for kids than widespread destruction. More distributed wealth means more people can work on defenses or deal with emergent problems. More wealth distributed means fewer kids growing up with brains damaged by poor nutrition. And so on. But I agree there will always be problems. But we can still probably reduce the frequency a lot.

A basic income is more likely to break the current world of (wage) slaves and masters we have than to create one:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

But I also mention three other aspects that are important too (a gift economy, improved subsistence, and improved planning).

Things like compulsory schools and wage-slave workplaces are also main distribution points for plagues, given most people do not have the option to stay home for a long time. We should move beyond such security problems.

"Explain to me how that fosters innovation. "

Because it causes deflation -- everything is cheaper, which makes it easier to live on less and have more free time for innovation.

After hundreds of years of innovation, we've now reached the point where most human labor is spent on "guarding", not "production".
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" by Dan Pink
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

And on how Bill Gates learned to program in part from dumpster diving to read other people's code:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952

People like Eric von Hippel at MIT have written about how about 80% or so of innovation comes from customers, anyway...

What we really need is a "basic income" so anyone who wants to focus on innovating and giving away the results without enforcing "artificial scarcity" can afford to do so.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

"Absent the capitalist system of letting the market decide which products are desirable, how do you determine which ebooks deserve to succeed? How do you determine how much to reimburse the author? These are the fatal flaws with hard-core socialism / communism: you have no reliable, accurate way to determine the best way to allocate resources."

J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter while she was on the dole.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3666215/From-the-dole-to-Hollywood.html

How do you explain the success of "free software" or the success of the Debian project that is coordinated through emails and chat messages instead of dollars? What often determines what succeeds and is maintained is by what people think is useful (not who has money to pay for it).

Why do people need to be "reimbursed"? People can be motivated by the work itself:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

It turns out creativity often suffers if it is remunerated.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

Further, why do we have to keep innovating like crazy if we never get to rest after all that innovation is done? Haven't we made life easy enough that we can get back to spending time with family, friends, hobbies, contemplating nature or the infinite, being a good citizen, and so on?

Most work just exists to preserve (through "guarding") the work system itself; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.whywork.org/

What are you going to propose to do when robots and AIs can do much of the work? How are you going to earn a living?
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

(Posting AC as I have 15 mod points in the discussion, including modding your post up because it does raise an important point. :-)

"Absent the capitalist system of letting the market decide which products are desirable, how do you determine which ebooks deserve to succeed? How do you determine how much to reimburse the author? These are the fatal flaws with hard-core socialism / communism: you have no reliable, accurate way to determine the best way to allocate resources."

J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter while she was on the dole.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3666215/From-the-dole-to-Hollywood.html

How do you explain the success of "free software" or the success of the Debian project that is coordinated through emails and chat messages instead of dollars? What often determines what succeeds and is maintained is by what people think is useful (not who has money to pay for it).

Why do people need to be "reimbursed"? People can be motivated by the work itself:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

It turns out creativity often suffers if it is remunerated.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

Further, why do we have to keep innovating like crazy if we never get to rest after all that innovation is done? Haven't we made life easy enough that we can get back to spending time with family, friends, hobbies, contemplating nature or the infinite, being a good citizen, and so on?

Most work just exists to preserve (through "guarding") the work system itself; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.whywork.org/

What are you going to propose to do when robots and AIs can do much of the work? How are you going to earn a living?
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

(Posting AC as I have 15 mod points in the discussion, including modding your post up because it does raise an important point. :-)

Good points, and thanks for the kid words about the article.

I feel lack of universal health coverage, for example, is one thing holding back more entrepreneurship in the USA. I've known several people who said they can not change jobs or try something different over health insurance worries.

But, that is in some sense by design; from "Conceptual Guerilla":
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
"When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just âoedime-store economicsâ â" intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly donâ(TM)t. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor" Thatâ(TM)s their whole philosophy in a nutshell -- which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives"
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position -- "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labo"â angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor. ,,,"

Of course, the ultimate in "cheap labor" is "no labor" -- replacing labor by a machine, a computer, better design, cheap energy, or volunteers, or something else. Technology is making that all possible, and even easier. For example, cloud computing makes it easier to get rid of system administrators.

So, in general, the bargaining power of most labor is eroding, because productivity is rising but demand is limited (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle)..

I'm not saying the bargaining power of all labor is eroding, just most labor. Some people are still in demand, generally those with certain combinations of rarer skills combined with social connections. But all that contributes to an increasing rich/poor divide. More and more people are finding that a highly automated industrial system just does not need them. And that is bad news in the absence of some sort of social safety net, or better, some sort of social security as a human right as a citizen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms

You used the word "competitive", but the fact is, cooperation is more what we need.
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm

Why should US citizens have to be "competitive" with wage slavery or full automation because of an income-through-jobs link?
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

People saw this was going to happen even in the 1960s, but sadly the Democrats ended up pushing for full employment rather than social equity as a right to access the fruits of the industrial commons:

And the Republicans became the party of technological progress in some ways (but co

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

There really aren't any big job centers I know of much outside Albany in the Adirondack Park (although there certainly are upstate job centers like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and so on). Much of the people who have local jobs in the Park either work for the government (town or schools) or work at one of the small businesses that are either infrastructure (paving, home repair) or seasonal (restaurants, marinas). Where we live, of the permanent residents, I think something like more than half are retired (quite a few who moved to the area and maybe started out as summer residents).

One person who moved here from California said, accurately, that everyone in the North East says California is dangerous because of the occasional earthquakes, but they forget how dangerous annual ice is. I know several people who have been injured slipping on ice (myself included). "Yaktrax" are a great innovation for ice. :-) But there is not much you can do about the blackflies other than stay indoors from middle May through middle June when the weather is otherwise wonderful.

If we did not work from home, it would be rough as far as jobs, especially in winter (which can be about five months out of the year with ice). Had we lived very close to, say, RPI (near Albany), I probably would have tried hard to work there on the occasional FOSS projects they do, but as it is, it's hard to contemplate that drive every day.

Beyond the climate, the lack of jobs had kept house prices down (unless you live on the water). A neighbor commuted just under an hour and a half each way each day, and had to get a new car every three years or so from putting so much mileage on it. All the commuting must have been hard on his family, even as he adjusted to it (your brain can zone out when you are used to the routine). Of course, people in California have four hour round trip commutes sometimes, and certainly people who work in NYC and take the train may also have commutes that long. Still, at least in the train you can read safely or do something else.

Self-driving cars (like Google is using now, or have been underdevelopment really for more than twenty years) may change some of the dynamics of rural life. With self-driving cars, commuting time in a rural setting could be more productive if you don't have to keep your eyes on the road and can be talking and typing and surfing the web all relatively safely. So, you might be able to put in two hours towards your work while traveling, or otherwise do personal stuff during the trip back and forth. Some people who work in NYC with long commutes get deals where they can count work on the train towards work at the job, so it could be something like that. We'd need better wireless service for that though. And with all that fancy technology, maybe we'd see the end of work as we know it, too. :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Anyway, there is a lot to be said for just visiting the Adirondacks. The summers after the fourth of July can be nice, but you avoid all the other issues from the climate and bugs. There's a reason that so many farms failed in the Adirondacks -- it is a tough environment living so close to mountains with a problematical climate. You see it at its best climatewise if you just spend summers.

Saratoga Springs has some technology jobs and is near the boundary of the park. And Saratoga Springs does not have quite the same bug problem (although ticks are on the increase from the suburbanization). And there are jobs opening up near there in Malta related to the AMD plant (although that is near Albany):
"Construction of $4.2 billion computer chip plant begins near Saratoga"

"At a certain level though, a student has to be able to do arithmetic, be able to read, and write, in order to do anything in our society. If he's going to be an engineer, he needs math (especially algebra) and the fundamentals of science."

In terms of continuing to try to reconcile our common interests to the greatest extent possible, consider, and connected with the previous item on Mark Frauenhoffer's comments on schools and the Maker/DIY movement, consider this by Seymour Papert:
    http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
"I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don't blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a more engaging, less coercive curriculum do indeed end up taking the guts out of the learning. But it is not fair to hold me guilty by association. My whole career in education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that will harness the passion of the learner to the hard work needed to master difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the "touchy feely ... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education.
    Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
    Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world. ..."

Which also relates to this story (from the 1950s but presaged the web):
    "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon
    http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1

And this essay by from 1985 that presaged the ongoing DIY/Maker/Open trends:
    "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

And also this other item I just posted related to the DIY/Maker/OpenManufacturing scene:
  http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/70fec0838320517b
   

"The anarchistic model doesn't work. If you give kids freedom to do work, or not... they don't do it. And then they drop out. Simple as that. There's ample evidence supporting this. I'm not saying that kids don't need *more* freedom - just that giving them too much freedom is pretty much proven not to work."

First off, you don't have to be an "anarchist" to say what is happening to children in most mainstream compulsory schools is very wrong, between the extreme authoritarianism, the drugging (even though through prescription), the violation of civil rights, the rampant bullying, the lack of privacy, the prison-like atmosphere, the lack of choices, and so on:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

It's not anarchism to say that some place smells like fascism and we can do better in a democracy...

Citations as to drop out rates for alternative schools? And also think it through. What is even the problem of "dropping out"? What are kids missing that has any relevance to their lives these days? Having access to more schooling? Having a "good job" when most jobs are becoming obsolete? Something by an anarcho-socialist: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Do kids "drop out" of going to the public library or using the internet?
My comments on that:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

On your point on 21st century curriculum goals, as Gatto says here:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. ... After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life. ..."

So, your outlining a good curriculum in terms of aspirations means very little... That's why it is incorrect to say society has discarded the model of schooling designed to make human beings into machine-like reliable workers, soldiers, and consumers. It's still there, in the medium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Let's go point by point through what you quote:

Creativity and Innovation -- how can you learn that in what is essentially a prison atmosphere with a weird mix of authoritarianism and intense peer pressure you can not avoid (like by staying home or going to the library or picking who you want to hang out with), whatever the course work entails?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving -- how can you learn that when every question has a "right" answer, and you are not even allowed to get any significant practice about deciding what questions are worth studying because the curriculum has it all laid out for you on a schedule, and you have to pass a standardized test on it?

Communication and Collaboration -- As I linked to for Alfie Kohn, the process of grading damages any attempts at that...

At least everyone in Cuba have access to medical care.
    http://www.hr676.org/

On your points:

"Go to work,"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

"send your kids to school."
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/

"Follow fashion,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-consumerism
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

"act normal."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

"Walk on the pavements,"
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about (shows how unusual that is)

"watch T.V."
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/
http://www.tvturnoff.org/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

"Save for your old age,"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

"obey the law."
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

"Repeat after me: I am free."
http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner-1960s-video/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

Any more? :-)

Are you posting from work? :-)

Not safe for work in a political sense:
    http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Also, on rethinking economics related to jobs:
    http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Also, vitamin D deficiency is an oocupational hazard of indoor IT workers. You may want to start taking 5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily and get your blood tested regularly, as recommended here:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

And get your coworkers to get tested for vitamin D deficiency too, before OSHA gets on your case. :-)

See: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

For the future, see Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Or me: :-)
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

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

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

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

"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."

That statement confuses the physical notion of doing something a person think needs to be done with the social notion of a job implying a "boss", a currency system, a state with police to enforce property rights and contracts, rich/poor divides, and so on. There will always be things to do and people to do them (if Skynet running Predator drones does not kill us all) -- but that does not mean there will always be "jobs", like Bob Black talks about.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Sahlins points out that a couple hours of self-directed activity a day was all most hunter/gatherers did as work on average (the rest being what we would term either recreation or child care or socializing or household tasks). That is a completely different psychological experience than eight to ten hours a more a day in a highly structured hierarchical environment. It is more akin to the psychological experience of healthy wealthy people. Farmers had a much tougher life, granted, as you can see from the decrease in skeleton size when people were forced to switch to agriculture -- but humans are naturally adapted to material prosperity for much of our recent existence, with small populations and a huge planet.

Why do things cost so much? Mostly, at this point, due to artificial scarcity. As Bob Black references, most labor today relates to guarding in some form or another. It is not just the huge amount of money spent on the military or obvious private security or prison guards (the US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country). It is also every sales clerk, every lock, almost every lawyer, every medical billing staff person, much of what many accountants do most of the time, most of what most government employees do, and so on -- all guarding something or someone. These people are all guards. Patents and copyrights are all about guarding (not the ideas and digital files themselves, but the legal aspects). Much of schooling is about guarding, both imprisoning kids during the day and creating a bunch of certification hoops to keep them busy, sometimes for decades. And because things need to be guarded, people can't cooperate, driving up even more costs by redundancy or sabotage. Probably (guessing) at least 90% of the economy is about guarding. So, that's why things cost 10X more to produce than they have to if they were free.

If things cost one-tenth what they do now, would people have to worry so much about guarding them? So, it is a hysteresis effect or a form of self-fulfilling prophecy -- people need to guard everything because guarding makes everything so expensive and precious. It is the tragedy of the anti-commons, the tragedy of competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"""
We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detri

You have a point in protecting others from additional bullying as the next victim. Still, what do you do if the bully is two years older than you, outweighs you by fifty pounds, is trained in some combat skill (martial arts, wrestling, etc.), might be packing a weapon, and is popular with his/her cohort?

Also, many social situations have an element of ambiguity; what if things then become a cycle of feuds and violence, perhaps escalating in various ways?

Some bullies are also often excellent at playing a role in a social hierarchy and making themselves look like the victim, so the consequences of trying to go one-on-one may actually just make you more the victim in some situtaions. Also, you are assuming physical violence, what about verbal assault, especially the kind of stuff that goes on with the toxic girl culture?

Community is more of an answer that works in more situations. There are other solutions to conflicts than either violence or threats of it. See, for example, ideas about mutual security:
    http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430

Lots more ideas:
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=solutions+to+bullying

Still, another aspect of the bullying problem is that the normal behavior for people being bullied might be to avoid the bully; but compulsory schooling makes that impossible, and bullies take advantage of that, whether in a classroom, in a school yard, or on a bus. And as I said, compulsory schooling is bullying at its core as well (derived from Prussia),
    http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
and almost every teacher standing up in front of a class is essentially setting an example of how to use authority to bully. Bullying is essentially another negative externality of compulsory schooling. John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the year, goes so far as to say in his writings that the schools become co-dependent on bullies and other violent students to keep the status quo going by keeping children living in fear in various ways.
    http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle513-20090405-03.html
"""
School order came to depend upon maintaining good relations with the toughest bullies, covertly affirming their right to prey upon whiners and cry-babies (though never cry-babies from politically potent families). The intellectual dimension was removed from almost all classrooms as a matter of unwritten policy, and since test scores are independent of intellect, those teachers who tried to hold onto mental development as a goal, rather than rote memorization, actually penalized their students and themselves where test scores were the standard of accomplishment.
"""

Bullying may happen in other compulsory settings tool, like the typical workplace, but here are some ideas about that too: :-)
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

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/

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

Healthy humans only need so much stuff. Automation may be good for firms that do it, but if demand is limited, jobs disappear in the system. That's why capitalist systems must grow continually, to create new jobs to make up for productivity increases. The problem is, too much stuff actually can get in the way of a good life, since good human relations are generally the most important part of a happy life and too much stuff distracts from that. Also, right now, much stuff has negative external costs involved in its creation (though we may someday move beyond that).

Here is some sci-fi on ironies in a world of abundance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage. ..."

But, that would still be a big shift from what we have now, which is based on the idea that people only have a right to consume based on the value of their labor. This was talked about back in the 1960s in a letter sent to President Johnson in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

To deal with increasing automation destroying the value of most labor given limited demand, what we need more is a global sharing of the wealth produced by an automated industrial commons, which means taxes for a basic income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
or transitioning to another economic model like a gift economy or a subsistence economy or something else. The big issue is not so much automation (although there are aspects that are negative of loss of control or loss of joy in hands on work that you may love) but the issue of how the fruits of automation get distributed. Related on three different visions of work we need to bring together for the 21st century:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html

Think of this example: someone sets up vending machines powered by solar panels in every community, and these machines print wood shaped to order for very low prices, and the machines take next-to-no labor to keep going. Basically, what you outlined, only even better (maybe the devices just suck carbon and water from the air to make the wood). Your company can't compete with the prices and quality and speedy delivery, so everyone you employ is laid off. The owner of this enterprise, who owns all the patents and who gets all the money, decides to pile it under his or her mattress, or alternatively, gamble it in high stakes poker games (called derivatives :-) that just move to higher and higher stakes. Where are the new jobs there? Sure, that company may make a few new jobs, but overall, lots of labor is saved, so there is a net negative as far as jobs, because healthy people only need so much wood. The only reason to even worry about jobs is this issue of the right to consume, as well as government enforcing monopolies on land or patents or copyrights, since otherwise there is so much abundance we could organize the economy differently, like GNU/Lin

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."

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

Links with four different approaches:
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
    http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
    http://www.thevenusproject.com/

A "basic income" or making work fun are other alternatives.
  http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Bob Black talks about "the abolition of work" here:
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "

These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:

• temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
• government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
• a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
• improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
• a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
• a shorter work week (like tried in France);
• rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
• alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
• increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
• intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
• more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
• more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
• more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un

These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:

• temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
• government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
• a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
• improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
• a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
• a shorter work week (like tried in France);
• rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
• alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
• increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
• intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
• more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
• more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
• more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un

Wow, thanks for the fascinating and informative reply.

Related links:
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue21/Stanford21.htm
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47

On Marxism, Joan Roelofs
http://mysite.verizon.net/joan.roelofs/index.htm
has suggested that Charles Fourier said anything good that Marx said decades before him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
Bob Black wrote this essay inspired in part by Charles Fourier's ideas:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

My take on economics, inspired by cybernetics:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Or just rethink "work" in general:
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Also:
    "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

Regarding: "what reason would the guy have to make the music in the first place? Sure, there's the love of music, but some people ... have to put food on the table."