Ludwik Kowalski <kowals...@mail.montclair.edu> wrote:
> We believed that in the next economic system, Communism, people will be > receiving goods "according to their needs, not according to their work. > In the distant future, hundreds of years from now, it is certain that things will work out this way, because there will be no need for any human labor, and because the technology for things like robots will be in the public domain and available to everyone at no cost. I mean that patents will have expired, and the technology will be so cheap with automatic replication machines that there will be no way to charge anyone for it. Cold fusion may be the first technology to reduce a major world-scale expense to zero, but others will surely follow. People will eventually have all the food they want for free, or nearly for free, from small automated farms. See: http://www.freightfarms.com/ http://www.freightfarms.com/features/ These may even be built into houses. You see them in some Japanese restaurants already. When you order a salad, the waitress cut the lettuce from a glass automated greenhouse next to you. Two hundred years from now, trying to charge the customer for the use of cold fusion or for a new robot would be like trying to charge a person nowadays for gathering sticks and making a bonfire, or trying to charge a person for gathering rocks on his own property and making a stone wall in Pennsylvania. Fire and simple stone construction techniques are millions of years old. No one controls them. In Pennsylvania, a skilled person can charge a lot of money to gather rocks and build a stone retaining wall in a barn. This takes a great deal of skill, special tools, mortar and so on. The rocks may come from the property owner's own land a few meters away, but you can still charge for the labor. However, in the distant future, a large robot will download the skills needed to do this, and it will do the job for free. There may still be some incidental expenses for mortar, specialized tools, a building permit and so on. - Jed
