From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Dec 28 2001 - 18:11:15 MST
Technotranscendence wrote:
>
> A few years ago, I saw a retrospective on the 1960s. In it, some guy
> whined about how automation was taking jobs away. I got the idea the
> guy didn't do a study of the problem, but was just mouthing slogans in
> the air at the time. Why would I think this? Well, partly from his
> demeanor I admit and the fact that the person interviewing him didn't
> bother to challenge him on this, but also partly because there are more
> jobs now in total in the US, then there were in the 1960s.
The interesting question though is whether there is a
significant migration of jobs available toward requiring a level
of skill and intelligence that only a small minority of the
population has. If this is increasingly the case then there is
a real problem of how the rest of the population will have a
reasonable standard of living and dignity. As we near the
Singularity I am certain we will eventually need to deal with
this question. I am pretty sure we already do need to deal with
it.
Query: As we reach hyper-abundance and most manufacturing is
near totally automated, exactly why would you require every
adult to have a normal job in order to have a stake in and
access to that plenty? It is quite easy to see there would be
no meaningful work for them that anyone would care to hire them
for not far down the road at all. What then? In a world of
plenty why is scarcity based thinking concerning "earning" a
living appropriate?
>
> I think the thing holding the Third World back is not the lack of First
> World foreign aid, but the lack of respect for property rights (see
> Hernando De Soto's -- the Peruvian economist NOT the Spanish
In a world where all material items (except fixed land resources
and so on) can be had simply by asking the local nanobots to dig
up the pattern and produce it, what exactly would property
rights apply to and why would you care?
- samantha
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