A society with no work.

I have been thinking for a while now about what will happen in a few decades when we can effectively automate many of the tasks that make up the bulk of workforces in the world. Things like: stacking shelves, driving buses, checkout clerks, call centres, security, cleaning, waiters, fast food industry, factory work etc could all become jobs of the past, only creative positions would remain and people could have exceptionally short working weeks while still keeping the economy booming. Here are some of the question to think about:

How would this impact on peoples perception of money?

What would people do?

Would goods become so cheap to make that we could have things without even working for them?

Would people receive money just because they are there?

Could the world end up as a communist utopia that actually works?

I hope one day the world does become a communist utopia.

But in my opinion we have to have captialism for the moment.

I sure aint that arsed about money and material things as much as others , but to each there own.

There's always going to be work, it's going to take armies of programmers, chemists, engineers and architects to design this utopia...

And even then it's going to take armies of tradesmen to build and maintain it...

Agreed, but i work for the pleasure of it not for the money , even though it has it benfits lol.

If a communist utopia was to form people would do it for that reason.

But we cant just impliment communism , look what happened to russia

Until we have evolved as a race people will always want more and more

really I think it would be more along the lines that there would be a widning of the money gap unskilled or semi skilled people would all be put out of work. Really who is just going to give there goods away not many thats for sure. On the other hand if you where to buy some robots and then rent them out to do work that would be another matter. Kinda like replacement for you at work. of corse you would only get like 5 bucks a hour per bot you owned but after a point it would be a nice money maker.


Or at birth you are given 250,000 dollers by the goverment. You have to be a lest a 3rd generation in that country. So you don't get boarder hoppers to pop out a kid and get the cash. Your money can't be touched tell you turn 18 at which point you would have access to it but only the intrest earned after you 18th birthday. 18 years intrest at 5% per quarter would be around 900,000 dollers so for a total of 1,150,000 would be in your bank at 18 you would only have access to 150,000 and then what ever intrest you would get from your million. per year after that if done quarterly thats 200,000 a year to live on. You could also invest that 200k to up your amount per year.


so the goverment of the USA is going to need loads of cash to give everyone 250,000 dollers. That means that it would need to come up with 65,000,000,000,000 about to give everyone alive in the USA to day 1 million dollers. 65 trillion not bad really. The USA GNP is around 10 trillion a year. The best solution would be forget everyone alive today and just go with newborns. If the USA goverment saved up 40 trillion dollars the intrest alone could pay for the hole proglram with around 10 trillion a year in intrest.

[edit on 10-2-2005 by shadarlocoth]

There is a free story about this exact thing here:

marshallbrain.com...

A very good read.

People would resist this quite a bit. Well, not all people, but the ones who actually do the lower level jobs. For a few years, they'd be out of a job and they'd still need to live normally. Radical changes in the ideal of money wont occur, gradually (as in years, maybe a decade), but in the short term, no.

None of this is right, that LERM stuff in the wingmakers information is meant to be as-standard, the 'Fall from heaven' means that inability to be self-sufficient in creating whatever you require - to the extent of having to kill or compromise other living things to keep yourself as a human going.

If you are part of the dynamic equilibrium of nature then you will be part of the predator-prey dance, which does not in reality have any anthropromorphic connotations at all, that means no '4D emotional drama' / soap operatics to it.
Once you are able to think outwith that it means you are beyond it, you are not just an animal, you think, in a reflective way - that is of the creator, and is not the same point of view as for beings that are part of the predator-prey dance, they do not experience it as 'being killed' if they are eaten, we just see it that way. We have other parts to us that set us apart from all that, because we have the ability to comprehend what it ( the predator-prey dance ) is in it's entirity,

the problem is just that we require manifest things to exist in a manifest world.

but most people cannot just make what they need, out of the aethers, as they ought to be able to do.

Not everyone can have a nice desk job that requires lots of skills. The population outnumbers those jobs. Plus, with no peons to delegate, what would the rich guys in the ties have to do other than read reports and look at computer screens?

Machines will NEVER replace musicains.

nor will they replace artists

Look up a book called (The Two Faces Of tommrow
Good book scifi or more accret would be sci of tommrow.
You wont need a guy to fix or programe anything as the mechiens will fix mechiens. And they will program each other as well and even be able to modfi there own programing to be better at what they do as they go along .
Once this system is finished humans will be TOTAL out of the loop.
If you look around you can already see this happing .

Robots will never take over; if anything, humans and machines will integrate. Humans ARE machines! We are just machines consisting of carbon, nitrogen, iron, oxygen, hydrogen, etc......where as standard mechanical machines consist of metals and plastics moreso.

But in you individual cells are pieces of machinery more complex than the most complex pieces of machinery out there. Humans will never be "out of the loop." We will integrate with machines as wel create them.

And people, humans like to work!! Programmers, artists, engineers, mechanics, etc....aren't going to go the way of the dodo completely. People like to engineer things and design things.

As for a utopia, that is just a dream. A utopia is an impossibility. The only way anyone could ever have a communist utopia is if every man and woman are identical to each other, and everyone owns the exact amount of the exact same thing (BORRRRRRING!!). I'll take regulated capitalism anyday.