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You can't get rid of money until you can vastly reduce envy, jealously and violence. The entire economic system is set up to balance the exchange of value of la

by rcarr 3y ago

You can't get rid of money until you can vastly reduce envy, jealously and violence. The entire economic system is set up to balance the exchange of value of labour across industries with those of power dynamics/capability to wage violence. In Star Trek, they can do away with money primarily because the invention of the replicator (and other tech) taking care of the basic needs of society, which lessens the need for competition between people. If you've got robots that can clean sewers and a machine that can print food from thin air, you no longer need a complex system of competition to allocate who is doing the shit jobs and who is eating the shit food. We're currently all still chimpanzees fighting each other to the death, we've just abstracted the violence away to such an extent that you don't see it anymore. The losers are still dying in droves, but they're dying to stuff like overdoses, homelessness, or not being able to access the doctors and healthcare their wealthy counterparts can. In my opinion, short of inventing the replicator, the absolute best thing we can do as a species is to get a mass produced humanoid robot that can be controlled via VR built as soon as possible. We then get people doing undesirable jobs to control the robots and train an AI until it gets to the point where it can do the job without a human on the other end. Not only do we free up all those people from doing shit jobs, we can retrain them to work on other pressing problems, like curing diseases or even one day far in the future, building a replicator.

cookiengineer 3y ago
What you're describing was literally my hope when Baxter came out as a robot. Generalization of low income tasks, which would in return force governments to find a more sustainable way to manage our societies. With the idea that people cannot be hired anymore compared to a robot, because the economic incentive isn't there anymore. My hope for basic income is still there, as this would allow a shift from a system that only has economic incentive to a system that has creativity and an aspirational incentive. Basic income would provide that, because nobody needs to work just to be able to exist, and they can then focus on "what they actually really want" in life. The argument that nobody wants to work in life is a little stupid, because I think that people want to do something when they're way too bored. Whether that's just shitty prank videos or research is up to our society, and if we make it "famous" to be smart then the incentive is much higher to do research.

by rcarr 3y ago

cookiengineer 3y ago

What you're describing was literally my hope when Baxter came out as a robot. Generalization of low income tasks, which would in return force governments to find a more sustainable way to manage our societies. With the idea that people cannot be hired anymore compared to a robot, because the economic incentive isn't there anymore. My hope for basic income is still there, as this would allow a shift from a system that only has economic incentive to a system that has creativity and an aspirational incentive. Basic income would provide that, because nobody needs to work just to be able to exist, and they can then focus on "what they actually really want" in life. The argument that nobody wants to work in life is a little stupid, because I think that people want to do something when they're way too bored. Whether that's just shitty prank videos or research is up to our society, and if we make it "famous" to be smart then the incentive is much higher to do research.