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Interestingly, we seem to be preparing longer and longer for our careers. Perhaps we'll eventually work a handful of days in our lifetimes, but spend 30 years preparing for that moment.

That sounds like a great plot for a sci-fi movie. Not sure if it would be a utopia or dystopia though ...

Weirdtopia, obviously.

This idea is way older than Buckminster Fuller. A key aspect of the rise of socialist ideologies from the mid 1800's was the view that technology would eventually render poverty "obsolete" by making production so efficient that redistribution would leave everyone able to do largely what they want.

E.g. in the German Ideology (1845), Marx wrote: " In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. "

But this was not to my knowledge an idea that originated with Marx, but was a general driver behind a range of socialist and proto-socialist ideologies dating back to well before the term socialism came into use.

Though to Marx it was one of the reasons for why he saw the fall of capitalism as inevitable: It will, according to him, chase efficiencies due to competition to the point where it will eventually saturate markets at the same time as it seeks to minimize labour and minimize labour costs. Since capitalism is geared towards continuous expansion, he believed this would lead simultaneously to eventual increases in poverty and overproduction as society tries to reconcile a situation where labour becomes less and less necessary while capitalist companies depends on more and more spending.

So to Marx, the crisis of increasing economic output coupled with reduced need for labour is what eventually pushes society to a tipping point where Marx argued socialist revolutions becomes not only viable, but necessary (you'll note that noe of the countries where people tried to force through revolutions in the name of socialism have been anywhere near this level of development; starting with Lenin, a number of people went through any number of contortions to try to make excuses for how socialist revolutions would be viable in countries that did not meet the criteria set out by Marx, and every one of them have been proven wrong; though of course that does not prove Marx right), and that they will eventually happen with or without help.

Marx tacitly admitted that capitalism would be more efficient at growing manufacturing etc., for the very reason that capitalism diverts far fewer resources to welfare. And this is one of the reasons why a well developed capitalist society according to Marx is a pre-requisite for socialism.

What's funny to me is that if we're gonna go hunt down the source, we can even make Jesus a data point when he pointed out you treat each other with love and love will free us all.

As a 53 year old, I somewhat resented "other olds," because I mostly think Kurzweil is a huckster peddling nonsense. Then at the mention of Star Trek, I accepted that you were making an allusion to an original series episode, and all made sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miri_(TOS_episode)

Kudos! Michael J Pollard (who is 74 and still with us, was awesome in this episode).

"A Point of View: Should the baby boomers leave the stage?" -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24765974

Oh, Owen, you'll always be the young and dashing Digg guy in my heart.

I'm about 40 lbs lighter and ran a half marathon this year. Less beer than in the digg days. But thanks!

>Well when you have replicators and automation to do all the work, you have more time to focus on other things.

The problem is, business models will probably bill you for time of use while you rent-out your replication.

Technology is great, but as long as their implementers seek profit over ideals, there's a pretty big obstacle to your utopia.

That's fine, though. Put down a basic income. People can live reasonably as they like, and then work on top of that because people get bored. Putting down a BI isn't going to stop people from having money; you're still going to have venture funding. Let someone take a risk on your idea. You deal with all the snafus and shenanigans of today, except neither of you are risking life itself. Worst case scenario, you live comfortably without having achieved anything.

Great exposition. I don't know if there is a growing number of "us" but I do know that the ideas of basic income, automated industry etc...are seeming to become more pervasive. Especially as we are actually seeing the automation of driving (see: Rio Tinto/Google) and other goods I hope the ideas will start permeating beyond technologists and singulitarians.

I see a basic income as basically a mechanism by which the elite pay off the rest to stop them rioting.

It's technically and physically possible once the energy problem is more behind us. But it would also require radical changes to the way financial assets are distributed and to the entire capitalist system itself. Otherwise 99% of that increase in productivity will go to less than a fraction of 1% and everyone else will live in slums.

I hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks out from total boredom and frustration.

Open your eyes and maybe you'll see why art can stop that.

Art is powerful, but it's not that powerful. War is in our blood. You're asking wild-born wolves to behave like domesticated dogs just because they have enough food. Heck, even domestic dogs can be pretty vicious.

More food, more trade, and more cosmopolitanism have decreased per capita violence by an order of magnitude compared to hunter gatherer societies and the first agricultural civilizations.

An interesting property of art is that is doesn't enforce anything. You have to be willing to accept its message. War is pretty much the exact opposite end of the same line of distributing power.

I've long since thought that the relation of peace to war is that of the absence and presence of violence. Whereas the relation of art to war is also one of opposition but along a different axis, that of creativity and destruction.

Looked at this way war has at least two 'opposites'. I put opposites in quotes because I think there are far fewer actual binary dichotomies than people make out.

While I'm on the topic. Same for love. They say the opposite of love is hate. But whereas love draws people together fear keeps keeps them apart so you could also say that fear is the opposite of love. Looked at in this way love has at least two 'opposites'.

I wonder how many other traditional binaries could be broken?

Things where all strategies are fair: war, love

Well spotted! :)

What is that expression? "All's fair in love and war"

In fear people come together to unite. In Love people come together to form amazing communities. In brink of war people unite to protect.

You can apply anything with anything.

War is just another expression of art.

Ahh, who doesn't love unrelated metaphors. You underestimated the power of neuroscience. All that rage and hate and bloodlust will be fixed with a small chip and a small tablet.

So we can play ever bloodier FPS games with ever increasingly real graphics.

Well... why not? If slaughtering your way through a horde of zombies is fun, and we can differentiate healthily between fantasy and reality, between zombies and real people, why the hell not?

Because someone thought of the children.

Please stop with the animal metaphor.

Firstly, human beings are omnivores, not pure predators.

Second, human beings have been evolving under the selection pressures of hunter-gathering lifestyles, semi-nomadic pastoral, settled farming lifestyles, and urban lifestyles for thousands of years now. The new lifestyles have been bred into our genes.

Third, if we really had no potential to behave like civilized people whatsoever, we wouldn't even feel morally drawn to civilized behavior at all. If we really were pure predators, "wild-born wolves", we simply wouldn't like cooperative behaviors or institutions whatsoever. The fact that we feel one mode of behavior is more moral is actually an indication that we are capable of that behavior, provided we actually choose to discipline ourselves.

Now if you'll excuse me, speaking of wild-born wolves, I have to go listen to that metal song again. Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind der Jäger!

What we eat has nothing to do anymore with why we kill.

As a whole, we hunt species to extinction just because some old geezers believe a horn is an erectile dysfunction cure.

Yeah, we can invade countries to search for a magic cauldron retconned to mean an easter souvenir, but we can't protect our home planet from an ecological devastation that will surely affect the future generations because we are now adapted to urban lifestyles and everything else is somebody else problem.

Somehow Agent Smith was right with the virus classification.

In the future, we may simply not have a use for violent people anymore. War can be automated to some extent. Violence can be abstracted, so it is done via remote control. This is already happening. Humans may just become domesticated, like dogs. If we have relative peace for long enough, those who can't control their violent urges just won't fit into society any more.

However, that doesn't negate your point that we could end up ruining it all through war. The thing is, most people want to follow, and they aren't very choosy about who leads them. Leadership tends to attract the kind of people who enjoy power, and so, even if resources are abundant, there is always something to fight about.

The technology that could bring about a lasting peace wouldn't be robotics, it would be some social mechanism through which we could obtain wise leadership. Which is certainly possible. Information technology opens up the possibility of entirely new levels transparency and accountability. Alternatively, there is the possibility of extremely rigid population monitoring and control.

Frankly, I think the most likely possibility is that there will only be a very brief period of time (maybe 50 years) between the point where we can automate all manual tasks, and the point where we have AI or augmented human minds, that are (by definition) impossible for us to predict.

I need to ask, when did we start routinely describing positive-sum cooperative behavior as "domesticated", implying a crippling or emasculation of the species?

So far this war automation is the reason I believe governments will finally stop unlimited population growth.

A huge standing army will no longer be necessary. In fact, this is already slowly happening.

Art certainly can't stop the proliferation of refuse in landfills around the world. That is very much an industrial problem.

That's a pretty shitty future. It's also still definitely better than the current-day society you support.

> while breeding profligately

Except, of course, that all our experience indicates that once education levels, healthcare and general prosperity increases, reproduction rates drop.

If anything, if this effect continues, we'll reach a point soon enough where a shrinking population starts to become one of the things for us to worry about. Some countries already do worry about aging populations partially as a result of this, and it already is a major aspect of immigration debates in many European countries.

That's partly because women have careers in developed countries, which they won't if there's no work.

Financial independence != careers

So the entirety of English society helped pay to make Rowling incredibly wealthy. That seems like a pretty massive concentration of wealth for little benefit to society as a whole aside from some nice pablum to digest.

I don't know what she and her creations have since paid in taxes in the UK, but I'll wager a dollar that it exceeds the monetary cost to the country. Hell, compared to some uses of the tax payers money, I'd say that a lot of value was gained.

You're absolutely right. Rowling has explicitly stated in the past that she hasn't and won't use tax avoidance structures, so she will have paid 40% income tax on most of her income from the books.

Plenty of UK bands from the 60s to the 90s have mentioned unemployment benefits as being an important factor in allowing them to exist before they got famous.

The 'the entirety of English society' didn't do squad exept keeping her and her kids from becoming homeless and living on the street. She helped herself become incredibly wealthy. Do you think it's easy to find a pubisher? Try finding one when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum.

It is quite amusing to see attempts at discounting the welfare systems impact on her ability to attain her wealth, when she herself has frequently described it as important, and one of the reasons why she has happily continued to pay substantial amount of taxes on her earnings.

Noone is to my knowledge saying she did not also have a substantial impact on it herself - after all, we're not swimming in people who have achieved the same. But there can very well be more than one contributing factor.

To grasp onto your last statement: Try writing a book when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum if she did not have a working welfare system to "break my fall" as she herself put it.

It was her effort, but the welfare system made it possible for her to put in that effort.

EDIT: Though just for the record, as rich people go she is definitively one of the most sympathetic, not least for the way she has made it exceedingly clear that she believes it is fair for her to pay her taxes in the UK without complaint, given what she believes she owes to the system in the first place - and to the extent that she explicitly hit out at the conservatives for wanting to cut taxes for the rich.

Well sir, I totally agree with you. Thanks for the good conversation. (Speaking as someone who also owes a large part of my education to the welfare system of my country).

If rich people paid less tax they could spend more money, thereby paying more tax.

No, the entirety of English society paid to keep Rowling barely fed and sheltered for a short time, during which she wrote the first Harry Potter book. Then all the people who like her books enough to pay for them made her incredibly wealthy.

I remember in the USA when the Harry Potter books were starting to go mainstream (and the Christian Right were still trying to get the book banned because they promoted witchcraft). There was an short piece on an NPR program that talked about the phenomenon of kids lining up in droves outside bookshops for the launch of the books - this was way before Apple copied the idea :) I would say that the net gain to humanity in the long term, purely based in terms of kids literacy, was worth many, many times Rowling's personal fortune.

Oh, hey, it's the Anti-Fun Squad come to tell us that a good series of kids' books has no actual worth just because.