Quote from: Mike Christ on October 25, 2013, 06:13:49 PM

It seems we're barreling toward socialism, or socialism. If those are our two options, I'm rooting for socialism; it seems capitalism doesn't function right when you have a people without labor, since the owners of capital have no way of selling their products to people who aren't working. Rather, if people mutually agreed to work the land for their own benefit (in this case, agreed that the machines should do it), they can get the basic necessities they need and continue to work (in the fields machines can't automate, of course, unless A.I. becomes a real thing) to improve their condition.

Which is my hang-up; I can't picture a world without money, for this implies a world in which labor is not necessary, ergo a store of one's work is no longer a necessity. This is not because I believe it is impossible, but because it is so abstract from the world as we know it that I would need a complete understanding of the world as it is just to see one that completely isn't.

But we're left with a problem: what if you don't want to be some kind of scientist or creative? Perhaps the scientists and the creatives still need human labor to assist them, and can be paid for doing that; since all the necessary work is handled by the perfect slaves and thus, all items necessary to life are essentially very inexpensive and high quality, it seems a person can still make a great living while working few hours; socialism normally has this effect but the machines help tremendously. After all, the original machines were the natural driving forces behind agriculture some 8k years ago, allowing people to not only feed themselves but to feed others. Now we're to the point where machines can potentially completely replace the need for a human laborer. The only difference with all our technological advances, the surplus created by machine tends to get sucked away to whomever owns the means of production, thus making the wealthy class possible at all.

And then there's the RBE conceived by Jacque Fresco which I'm not entirely sure about.

Anyway, I don't see either of the listed options as permanent solutions; one is bound to break when people don't want to be taxed to their eyeballs, the other has proven in the past to be troublesome, and not to mention how much limited freedom curtails in being unable to decide for oneself what the self needs and doesn't.

We'll probably end up bored of this planet and start exploring space and beyond?