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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Bertrand Russell is another person who's written on that subject. His question was more or less: if we reach the point where our basic needs can be taken care of by robots, will that mean everyone starts with their basic needs taken care of... or will it instead mean that whoever owns the robots, and claims their labor, will be in a very strong position?

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Or you can take natural law thinkers like Grotius - in essence, their thinking derived from religion thus: you are owned by God -> you cannot kill yourself -> in times of hardship (an in extremis condition) you must take what you need in order to live. Very interesting, as he also defined property in terms of his religious beliefs...

I guess what I'm getting at is either you have the people breaking into the grain stores (in Grotius' day, anyway) or you provide some means of subsistence.

You may be aware, but for the edification of others I would point out that these ideas find their roots much earlier than Grotius. For example Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, "In cases of need all things are common property." [1]

[1] http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3066.htm#article7

I think our concept of basic needs is highly flawed. The moment some of our basic needs get taken care of, the new ones replace them.

In general any thing given away for free, will always be perceived as worthless. That is how it works!

I disagree. I believe that among the things given for free some would be missed less or more than others, like free water compared to free tv if one happened to live in the sahara. Things we are dependent on for daily subsistance are more basic than the ones we easily get used to their absence.

> The moment some of our basic needs get taken care of, the new ones replace them.

No, the new ones add up to them. The basic needs are still there and it is a priority to take care of them first and before the "new ones".

And what would be wrong with a society that would be able to provide basic sustenance to every citizens AND a free internet/tv/car etc. ?

In the USA as of 2013, everyone already has their basic needs taken care of--or at least what Bertrand Russel would consider the basic needs, of course we have redefined them since to mean things which in his time would have been considered luxuries.

It depends on whether the people without robots can kill the people who own the robots.

They can't, because the people who own the robots also own a robotic police force.

Two years ago when Mubarak told the Egyptian army to spray protestors with bullets, and the soldiers refused. That's because he didn't have a robotic force. The future is probably going to be horrible.

You think a robotic police force is going to help a dictator? Maybe for a couple of days, until someone with a conscience and a brain realizes that Robocop is running a vulnerable version of Java and suddenly "your" robotic police force is my robotic police force.

There's no reason though that the person who pays for the vulnerability to be exploited, or performs the exploit, can't be a [malevolent] dictator though.

Except that most people are good, especially among hackers. If this wasn't the case the world would already have exploded -- you don't think those drones they fly around with missiles attached to them have exactly zero vulnerabilities, do you?

The most dangerous thing for the future is the opaque systems and "dangerous information" prohibitions that deprive the public of the knowledge necessary to fight the bad guys. Reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/504/

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