I used to love robots...

I'm assuming we still have it, since we'd be more likely to achieve that kind of automation than to phase out money.

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Yeah, I don't think a post-scarcity society will happen, either. I think most likely what would happen instead with so much increased automatization is that we will saturate demand before we saturate the labor market, therefore making very few able to work in the economy, and everyone else will just be very poor and treated like useless sacks of flesh because they don't work.

Why do you have to work, once you have complete automaton?

There's no reason to do anything except maintain the machines then.

That and any other desire you have.

This, of course, would require a restructuring of how the economy and government works, as well as how people think.

But the idea of someone who has all the free time in the world to do anything they like complain that they can't break their backs doing grueling labor..

It's just bizarre.

If the nation that you are describing is a democracy, nothing prevents in principle "everyone else" from ruling that they should be granted a reasonable standard of living anyway.

That is, if the population is informed and politically active enough to take care of its own interests, of course.

edited 31st Jan '13 2:09:57 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I do not understand how that could ever happen.

MONEY! With no jobs, they don't earn no bread, and with no bread they'll starve. How is this not getting through to you?

edited 31st Jan '13 6:10:33 AM by maxwellelvis

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

Then it's not post-scarcity.

In a post-scarcity society you have a small box which will grow a day's worth of food using nothing but freely available energy.

We're more likely to achieve Faster-Than-Light Travel in the next 100 years than achieve a Post Scarcity Society.

And physics presently looks down upon the idea of Faster-Than-Light Travel. (For now...)

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Indeed, most likely society in the next hundred years will feel very much like society today, but with more robots.

I dunno. Society today is pretty different from society one hundred years ago, under a lot of perspectives. Only, well, it is extremely doubtful whether people from 1913 could have made any sort of sensible prediction.

Stranger things have happened. Not often, granted, but they have.

edited 31st Jan '13 9:01:48 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well, it WOULD be strange for a true democracy to thrive in modern civilization.

Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great

I vaguely remember a statement about how much we will be able to understand the future will be akin to how much Joan of Arc would understand a Microsoft monopoly lawsuit- not at all.

^ At first.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Yeah, point is though she could not have imagined something that would be totally incomprehensible to her at first, just as we would not imagine and anticipate something that would be totally incomprehensible to us.