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Comment by chandler | Hacker News Reader

>> Why "combat" the impact of robots?

For an outside consideration, take the view outlined in this "Rules for Rulers" video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs )--especially the part that discusses what sort of political structures arise when wealth is generated mostly independent of human production (e.g. are we sitting on a gold mine?).

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As a counterpoint, it is possible to distribute windfall profits from natural resources in an equitable manner, and keep a functioning democracy. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-can-tiny-norway-afford-t...

It is rare, but not impossible.

Another rare example is the US where mineral rights are spread over millions of individuals instead of the govenment.

The view outlined in that video is that the systematic inertia brought by greedy self-centered assholes is nearly impossible to put a stop to by replacing just one person, ergo I take it to mean, that the only realistic way of implementing a sharing scheme has to start with a bloody revolution a-la the French Revolution. Or, of course, we can also just kill off enough people (middle-class and lower only, of course) so that the few remaining ones have guaranteed jobs maintaining the robots (see: Stalinist Communism).

In any case I predict the next few decades will be pretty exciting for future historians. The "A Song of Ice and Fire" kind of exciting.

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