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Comment by eb3c90 | Hacker News Reader

One possible future we should think about is one where humans are more capable (through technology) and can provide for more of their needs. So work would go back to being owned by us.

It would be a more self-sufficient life style, but on a higher technology base than farmers.

I'm blogging about it here at https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com . My post on universal basic income is probably the most relevant.

https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/what-afte...

I hope this line of thinking can be part of our discussion about the future of work.

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The header of your blog reminds me of a post by Eliezer in his Fun Theory sequence. The summary of the post:

"Living By Your Own Strength: Our hunter-gatherer ancestors strung their own bows, wove their own baskets and whittled their own flutes. Part of our alienation from our design environment is the number of tools we use that we don't understand and couldn't make for ourselves. It's much less fun to read something in a book than to discover it for yourself. Specialization is critical to our current civilization. But the future does not have to be a continuation of this trend in which we rely more and more on things outside ourselves which become less and less comprehensible. With a surplus of power, you could begin to rethink the life experience as a road to internalizing new strengths, not just staying alive efficiently through extreme specialization."

Full text: http://lesswrong.com/lw/wz/living_by_your_own_strength/

Fun Theory sequence: http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/

It will be interesting to see what will happen when we have the technology to live in a self-sufficient way. My pessimistic self tells me that capitalists will find ways to make this impossible or illegal without paying them through IP or other laws.

I hope when we get there that we have set up a Manufacturing Freedom Foundation, equivalent to the EFF.

I'd point to property taxes as a plausible way this can happen. They're already a non-trivial consideration for people looking at low-tech self-sufficiency, and I can only see this getting more pronounced.

(This is something in the back of my mind whenever I hear calls for a shift to land value taxation. I can't really see it happening in a way that doesn't further normalise wage labour).

This will be a big thing. We could give people an allowance of a certain amount of land that is tax-free (as we have in the UK for income).

In the longer term, government could also be self-sufficient. This might be unstable though, it might be better for there to be a contribution of materials/energy/information to the the government from self-sufficient communities. The government would still provide the value of protection/arbitration to the self-sufficient communities.

Agree an allowance would be a sensible way to go about this. But given that, as far as I can tell, most of the motivation for an LVT in the UK is some variant of "stick it to small private landlords", I think it's unlikely.

Not hatin, but this is an old idea -- as old as the industrial revolution. Still interesting though; I like your site.

I know a bit about the transcendentalist movement of the early 19th century. I'd be interested to links to earlier stuff.

I think the birth of proper AI is a critical juncture for this idea (either enabling more self-sufficiency or reducing it). Which is why I'm bringing it up again now.

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