Blaze Spinnaker <[email protected]> wrote:
> But, work they must. Or starve. > I believe you are missing the point. It used to be true that we must either work or starve. Nowadays something like 20% of us do not need to work -- taking into account children, retirees and the unemployed. We don't starve because machines do the work for us. In the near future that will be more like 50%, and within a lifetime it will be 99%. To impose that "work or die" rule now, by fiat, would be like insisting that everyone must learn to ride horses. Or that everyone must harvest and thresh wheat by hand. It would be imposing an imperative of a vanished technology on people for no earthly reason, to no one's benefit. Since we do not need 20% of people to work, and we can find nothing useful for them to do, why would we want to punish them for not doing something no one wants them to do? When other people eat food, it takes nothing out of my mouth, because we have food in abundance. With food factories we could easily produce a hundred times more than we need. It would be pointless, but we could do it. When other people read e-books or watch movies, that does not prevent me from reading or watching. An e-book can be replicated 6 billion times in a few minutes at practically no energy cost. Modern technology is unlimited in scope and capability. Every person in the world can now access millions of books at Google, and it costs only a little than it would to supply those books exclusively to only one mogul. We no longer need to compete for most resources, so it costs us nothing to supply other people with necessities of life such as food, water and education. Supplying them all with Rolls Royce automobiles or an exact copy of the Mona Lisa would cost a lot. That will have to wait for the Replicator. - Jed
