It doesn't just start with the gov though. You should also ask why universities teach mostly windows software and OSs. C# is taught over C++/Java/PHP/Python/whatever. Education is based on the windows platform.
Honestly, during my university education in computer science I haven't once been taught a Microsoft language. On the contrary, since my earliest intro classes I've been required to code in a Linux environment (my intro to C class even required me to code in either Vim or Emacs!). The languages I've been required to use are as follows: C, C++, Python, Java, SML, Perl, and Shell, all in a Linux environment.
In fact, the UNIX environment is emphasized so heavily at my university that in my free time I learned.NET just because I felt that I wasn't getting a well rounded education!
I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.
Sorry, but it's already been tried. It's called communism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky -- they all made exactly the same arguments you are now making about Capital (machines) creating an environment of abundance, and how capitalism had buried itself, becoming outdated. It needed to be replaced by a more "realistic" economic paradigm, one of abundance. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?
As it turns out, capital didn't produce abundance. Scarcity still existed, resources could not, as a rule, be sufficiently distributed so that every man could be satisfied. There were bread lines, there were ten year waiting lists for shitty cars, there was corruption. As you state, resources are finite. Labor is finite. Even in a world totally automated by robots, the economy is fundamentally limited by its natural resources and the currently existing capital. In other words, scarcity. There is an interesting phenomenon in capitalism called "manufactured scarcity." New goods don't appear in the market because there is a need for them. They appear in the market because somebody wants to SELL them. They then convince you that you need them through advertising. Without this driving force, an economy goes stagnant. Innovation flounders. This is the reason that command economies don't work, and why no matter what Mr. Marshall Brian says about economic alternatives, he is almost certainly oversimplifying things.
DARPA has been funding a lot of robotics projects recently. It seems they're very keen on producing robotic soldiers.
This comes on the tail of a recently-announced DARPA robotics project called the DARPA ARM project, which I'm heavily involved in.
http://www.thearmrobot.com/
I was kind of disappointed not to see it slashdotted when we did a press release about it!
The obvious benefit of doing competitions rather than first-party research is that you get the same results for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true of competitions like this, where the goal is to produce software or a procedure, rather than a physical robot, since the winning entry can be copied for free!
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't just start with the gov though. You should also ask why universities teach mostly windows software and OSs. C# is taught over C++/Java/PHP/Python/whatever. Education is based on the windows platform.
Honestly, during my university education in computer science I haven't once been taught a Microsoft language. On the contrary, since my earliest intro classes I've been required to code in a Linux environment (my intro to C class even required me to code in either Vim or Emacs!). The languages I've been required to use are as follows: C, C++, Python, Java, SML, Perl, and Shell, all in a Linux environment.
In fact, the UNIX environment is emphasized so heavily at my university that in my free time I learned .NET just because I felt that I wasn't getting a well rounded education!
Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.
Sorry, but it's already been tried. It's called communism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky -- they all made exactly the same arguments you are now making about Capital (machines) creating an environment of abundance, and how capitalism had buried itself, becoming outdated. It needed to be replaced by a more "realistic" economic paradigm, one of abundance. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?
As it turns out, capital didn't produce abundance. Scarcity still existed, resources could not, as a rule, be sufficiently distributed so that every man could be satisfied. There were bread lines, there were ten year waiting lists for shitty cars, there was corruption. As you state, resources are finite. Labor is finite. Even in a world totally automated by robots, the economy is fundamentally limited by its natural resources and the currently existing capital. In other words, scarcity. There is an interesting phenomenon in capitalism called "manufactured scarcity." New goods don't appear in the market because there is a need for them. They appear in the market because somebody wants to SELL them. They then convince you that you need them through advertising. Without this driving force, an economy goes stagnant. Innovation flounders. This is the reason that command economies don't work, and why no matter what Mr. Marshall Brian says about economic alternatives, he is almost certainly oversimplifying things.
DARPA has been funding a lot of robotics projects recently. It seems they're very keen on producing robotic soldiers. This comes on the tail of a recently-announced DARPA robotics project called the DARPA ARM project, which I'm heavily involved in. http://www.thearmrobot.com/ I was kind of disappointed not to see it slashdotted when we did a press release about it! The obvious benefit of doing competitions rather than first-party research is that you get the same results for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true of competitions like this, where the goal is to produce software or a procedure, rather than a physical robot, since the winning entry can be copied for free!