Re: Abolition of Work (was Re: Extropian Party Platform)

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Tue, 12 Oct 1999 17:48:46 -0500

There was a time when everyone on the planet was a farmer. Now, in America, it's one in fifty. In a sense, food has ceased to be a problem for the vast majority of the population; now it's TV sets. Maybe someday work itself will go the way of everyone being a farmer, amputations without anesthetic... The economy will just run itself.

"The Nirvana of ecommerce is a software agent buying a digital product
and paying for it with cybercash" - to paraphrase Quidnunc. I can easily see the day most of the economy runs without human intervention.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians   Heading for Singularity   There Is A Better Way