As an example, and with its own problems, the Raspberry Pi has proved "good enough" for a lot of embedded companies, who just accept various tradeoffs to code in Python (or whatever) under Linux. In ten years, such hardware will be even cheaper and even better, and may have even better RTOS support:
http://pebblebay.com/raspberry...

Likewise and even more so for the truly free and open source Beagleboard family:
http://beagleboard.org/

What a far cry from the Kim-1 with 1K of memory I bought as a kid (with my father's help) for probably 50X in current dollars what a Rapsberry Pi or Beagleboard costs and supplies about 1GB memory. We even had to build the power supply ourselves. :-)

This is not to disagree with what you are saying right now. I know how hard and important all that work can be. But if better tools eventually let fewer engineers produce more projects in the same time, and cheaper hardware means less constraints, and other standards change expectations so customers know to work within them, than the need for managing such complexity (including the human side) may go down. Granted with a rising increase in an internet of things and robotics, embedded work may well still increase in demand for a decade or two until better standards come to dominate the field and change the nature of so many embedded tasks. So, for anyone already well enmeshed int he embedded field, it may well be a good gig for the next decade or two.

Anyway, for fun, to go through your list (a bit tongue in cheek, so not completely serous answers):

"First of all the robot would have to sit in meetings with the customer understanding what the customer wants, telling him what can't be done and outlining alternative solutions in dumbed down language the customer understands. It should tell the customer if some of his choices will raise the cost (Yes, in theory the hardware can do X but the current drivers can't)."

This can be replaced in part by a web interface where the customer clicks on options and the software tells them if the combination is allowed.

"It would have to write an offer listing everything that the customer wants to have implemented but worded so he can't expect more for his money. It has to be worded so that sales people and management understand enough to agree to the price written at the bottom."

Again, web backend generates this based on web interface choices.

"It needs to understand all documentation provided by the customer and it needs to be able to find more. It also needs to know who it can ask for an undocumented detail. Currently documentation includes data sheets, Doxygen like API descriptions, articles, standards, schematics, forum discussions, RCS commit messages, source code, and books but there will probably be a new form designed to be understood by machines. It is also useful to remember everything the customer said even if it might turn out to be wrong."

This could be mostly replaced by machine-readable standards as you suggest.

"It has to know sources of errors. Documentation can have errors. There can be errors in the design of the hardware. The hardware might be faulty (f.ex. bad solder joints) and you need to know what will destroy the hardware (no you can't configure that GPIO to output a low value). It has to fix simple errors itself (yes, I did have to solder some jumper wires and pull up resistors in the past few years). If it can't fix the error, it has to discuss the problem with someone who can. If the problem won't be fixed (no we won't spin a new SoC revision for you) software workarounds have to be devised and the pros and cons have to be discussed with the customer. To be able to find errors, it has to know about software and hardware debugging techniques (printf debugging, Gdb, Valgrind, JTAG, oscilloscope probing, ...)."

Bad hardware becomes so cheap it is discarded. Twenty years ago OTI had embedded Smalltalk development tools that could make such debugging much easier. See:
http://www.slideshare.net/esug...

"It has to write code in a form that can be maintained. It has to merge code (complete components and updates thereof) from suppliers and know what has to be changed to make it work again. Our suppliers often don't know they are supplying to us, so is has to have an eye on their release and security announcements. It has to decide if an update is advised and then has to inform the customers (if they signed a support contract)."

Again, Smalltalk was the answer. It might be yet again someday. :-)

"It has to come up with software tests. Some customers explicitly want unit tests or detailed test reports. It has to do the tests that have been paid for. Of course the minimum testing is determined by what makes you feel confident that it works."

Yeah testing can be hard. But that's what unpaid exploitable interns trying to break into the industry so they won't starve are for. :-)
http://theintern.io/

"It has to write documentation. Test reports, end user documentation, API descriptions."

The new standard is that the need for documentation is an error that needs to be routed around. :-)

"It has to communicate with the customer to ask for things that have to be provided (We need a cable for your special connector on port X. When can we expect the display PCB to be done?), to learn about bugs and to announce releases. Doing so it has to be polite. It must be pleasant for the customer to communicate with the robot."

This is all handled by an Amazon-like web site.

"It has to meet with the customer for an integration workshop (Our first board revision will be assembled on Thursday. Can you come on Friday to make the software work? Yes, we know it did work on the evaluation board.) or to analyze bugs on size (Our factory stops working about a handful of times a day. No we can't send it to you and we won't connect it to the internet for debugging.)."

The web site is always available. The hardware downloads the updates itself wirelessly using some standard protocol.

"There is probably still something I forgot. In my opinion it would be inefficient to split all this between humans an robots. How would a human know what is possible if it doesn't do the coding? Given all that, I think my job is safe until machines are intelligent enough to rule the world."

Better tools will help fewer engineers do more. But I agree embedded engineering is one of the most important jobs in our society right now and the need will grow. However, in the same way engineers rarely solder individual transistors into logic circuits theses days, in the future, engineers may be working with large building blocks and better tools for integrating them. That also could just printing out a perfect (and self-testing) design based on simulation tests using standard building blocks. It is when we push the edges of things that we have the most issues to handle. As hardware and standards improve, the edges may get farther and farther away.

I agree software now is a mess. I program in JavaScript for deployability, but it too is a mess, and much harder to work with than Smalltalk or even Java or Clipper. HyperCard was another great system for its time. Greed harmed several of these languages, Smalltalk and HyperCard especially, but even Java by keeping it proprietary for so long.

Ironically, compared to the article's suggestion, it seems the more code we have, the more programmers we need to keep up with it. :-) On economics, one might otherwise expect that the more infrastructure code there is, the less workers you need to build more of it. Otherwise, in general, I agree with C. H. Douglas that we benefit by building on the work of previous generations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."

As I see it though, we probably have about 99X+ more programmers than we need already, as far as core infrastructure. :-) For example, why did we need JavaScript when Smalltalk was a perfectly fine language that was better in many ways? How many accounting software packages do we really need? How many word processors? How many CAD tools? How many plugins do we need to just work around problems produced by endless similar formats? Do we really need so many image formats or audio formats (driven in part by patents)? Most programs out there are essentially needless variations on basic themes. Just like most new pharmaceuticals (90%) are "me too" drugs for rich people's problems.

Much of what programmers do in practice is (perhaps unintentionally) make work for each other. It may well be worse than the legal profession in that sense (where lawyers make work for each other or create or encourage conflicts). A lot of that comes from the nature of capitalism and competition vs. alternative economic forms based more on cooperation. Programmers typically can't freely share code or specs with others in different businesses, so everyone is always re-inventing the wheel and reverse engineering data structures and data formats and communications protocols, which create a proliferation of slightly different code bases with different edge cases.

For another example, why do we really need so many web browser engines? Also, why could not some web standards body accept Sqlite as the defacto web browser data storage engine because there were not "multiple implementations"? A shared public codebase is often the best standard. Like Alan Kay says, any textual standard of more than five lines is ambiguous. On that Sqlite issue, see:
http://diveintohtml5.info/stor...
"All of which brings us to the following disclaimer, currently residing at the top of the Web SQL Database specification: "This specification has reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. Until another implementor is interested in implementing this spec, the description of the SQL dialect has been left as simply a reference to Sqlite, which isn't acceptable for a standard. ""

Instead of that well engineered Sqlite library, we now get a half-baked "IndexedDB" standard as Firefox refuses to support Web SQL as Sqlite even though Sqlite is already baked into the Firefox browser!
http://programmers.stackexchan...
"Short version: Web SQL was deprecated because standards are really important and turning Web SQL into a proper standard would have been prohibitively difficult. ...
    Mozilla's blog gives more details on their reasoning in particular for not supporting Web SQL; apparently they were one of the major voices in getting Web SQL deprecated.
    Should you go with Web SQL now? I don't expect the vendors that currently support it (like Google and Apple) to drop it any time soon, but IE and Firefox won't be adding it, and since it's deprecated, why invest in it? (For example, Ido Green, with Google Developer Relations, doesn't recommend using it.)"

Mozilla helped kill it! So now the web browser struggles to be a real personal development platform with well-defined efficient indexable local data storage (even though such code is already built in to almost all of them).

Still, programmers generally like writing new code. It can be fun. I would no sooner stop people from doing that than I would stop them from composing poetry or writing essays or painting pictures or talking to neighbors or cooking delicious meals or gardening in their backyards. As an example, I feel new experiments like the "Smallest Federated Wiki" are very much worth coding up:
http://fed.wiki.org/trending.h...

But in a business, every line of code in some sense becomes a debt that must be maintained ("technical debt"). The code you wrote yesterday is today's legacy code maintenance problem. Perhaps we need better tools to prioritize what legacy code most needs to be maintained?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Technical debt (also known as design debt[1] or code debt) is a recent metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor system design, software architecture or software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete or proper. If the debt is not repaid, then it will keep on accumulating interest, making it hard to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. As a change is started on a codebase, there is often the need to make other coordinated changes at the same time in other parts of the codebase or documentation. The other required, but uncompleted changes, are considered debt that must be paid at some point in the future. Just like financial debt, these uncompleted changes incur interest on top of interest, making it cumbersome to build a project. Although the term is used in software development primarily, it can also be applied to other professions."

And, as a scary thought, some theories of social collapse suggest civilizations fail when the cost of maintaining the growing infrastructure exceeds the returns produced by that infrastructure. Could we be reaching that point with software?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Tainter's position is that social complexity is a recent and comparatively anomalous occurrence requiring constant support. He asserts that collapse is best understood by grasping four axioms. In his own words (p. 194):
        human societies are problem-solving organizations;
        sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
        increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
        investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
With these facts in mind, collapse can simply be understood as a loss of the energy needed to maintain social complexity. Collapse is thus the sudden loss of social complexity, stratification, internal and external communication and exchange, and productivity."

I've worked towards simpler tools in a variety of ways (most recently trying to make the most of JavaScript as a defacto standard even with its problems), but of course, in some other ways my additional coding only adds to the problem of more competing "standards" and yet more legacy code...
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Pointre...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://xkcd.com/927/

Linked below are some further economic rambles by me on what to do when more people finally realize all this and more, especially if systems including mainstream economics start to collapse in unexpected ways (like as mainstream economics hits divide-by-zero errors due to plummeting costs or wages):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

What motivates people is autonomy, increasing mastery, and a sense of purpose. See Dan Pink's talk:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Or look at the writing of Alfie Kohn:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/punis...
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
" "We need competition in order to survive."
      "Life is boring without competition."
    "It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
    Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."

Progress or "advancement" in what direction is another good question to ask yourself. Is it a good idea to more quickly advance off a cliff? For example, the World Wide Web might have been a much better place and the web browser might have been a much better tool if not for all the effort various groups have put into undermining web standards for private gain (for example, Microsoft in the early years). The problem with a lot of competition is it encourages people to use power (including political power) to private gains while socializing costs, and that can be very costly and unpleasant overall for a community. Once can have *diversity* without explicit *competition*. What it takes is something like a basic income, easy subsistence production, free-or-cheap-to-the-user planned infrastructure, or some other means of ensuring people have the time and resources to create.

If our culture was as aggressive as the Romans, maybe the Earth would be a nuclear wasteland by now? Although, as "I, Claudius" suggests, a lot of Roman aggression was turned in on itself at some point, with political murders including of the leaders who might otherwise have made Rome a better place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"During the prosperous reign of Augustus, he is plagued by personal losses as his favored heirs, Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar, die at varying points. Claudius reveals that these untimely deaths are all the machinations of Augustus' cold wife Livia, who seeks to make her son Tiberius succeed Augustus. ... As Tiberius becomes more hated, he increasingly relies on his Praetorian Captain Sejanus who is able to make Tiberius fear Germanicus' wife Agrippina and his own son Castor. Sejanus secretly plots with Livilla to usurp the monarchy by poisoning Castor and beginning to remove any ally of Agrippina and her sons. ... Caligula soon loses his mind, after recovering from a severe illness, and declares himself a god. His behavior becomes more and more irrational as he bankrupts the country and kills thousands. ... Throughout Claudius reign he is being unwittingly manipulated by his adulterous and wicked wife Messalina who kills many of her enemies as well as being involved in bribery. ..."

If we did not have weapons based on the tools of abundance like nuclear bombs as a result of harnessing abundant nuclear energy, aggression out-of-control would not be such a big global issue and threat (even if aggression could always be a local issue). Ironically, harnessing nuclear power and other forms of advanced technology that could produce abundance (including abundant destruction) like robots and new materials has removed the reasons for much aggression over material goods, but we still are stuck in our old mindset emphasizing aggression as a way to deal with material scarcity. So, for example, we are ready to use nuclear energy in the form of nuclear weapons delivered by robotic cruise missiles whose batteries were charged by solar panels to fight over oil fields on the other side of the planet from us -- instead of using nuclear energy (or robot-constructed solar panels or whatever) to generate power locally. Image what the 21st century could have been like without two Word Wars if 1910s and 1930s Germany had worked towards breakthroughs in solar power and energy efficiency and agricultural efficiency instead of trying to steal someone else's coal and land. Now Germany focuses inward on innovation and efficiency and is peaceful and the economic powerhouse of the European Union.

I wrote about this broad issue at length here:
"Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)"
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue. ..."

That's the big issue as I mention in my sig, and it plays out in other ways including with food, media, addiction, and so on as human traits adapted evolutionarily for scarcity cause difficulties when confronted with some sorts of modern abundance.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.nancycarlssonpaige....
http://dianeelevin.com/sosexys...

All that said, cooperation within groups has also been a key trait of human beings.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...

But it is true that humans tend to have in group cooperation and out-group competition, something E.O. Wilson has written about. And human mating rituals also often revolve around proving something to stand out from the crowd, like James P. Hogan touches on in "Voyage From Yesteryear" depicting a culture where people compete by demonstrating excellence in some area. So, again, the biggest issue is not aggression or competition itself, but how those impulses are culturally directed. As. Mr. Fred Rogers' sang: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" That is the question.

BTW, bacteria are actually the dominant species on this planet, :-) and we forget to pay tribute to our underlords at our own peril. :-) Even your own "human" body (if healthy) has 10X more bacterial cells than human cells. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Now, if the world's bacteria would just give us a little more help in making self-replicating space habitats that could duplicate themselves form sunlight and asteroidal ore (including helping create the information tools to design them), we could increase their biomass in the solar system by a factor of 1000X or more. :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Try this: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/P...

You can enter the below short JavaScript script in the text box, and then push the "View Below" button to create a new div for the window which will pop up the alert as part of displaying itself.

    <script>
    alert("hello");
    </script>

If you enter a Data ID for the text and a User ID for yourself (can be almost anything) and click "Store" you will store that text in the web browser's local storage.

I wrote that about a year ago. It works under Firefox on Mac OS 10.6. It may not work as well elsewhere; for example Firefox under Win7 didn't work for some reasons when I tried it yesterday (but probably a minor error to fix). I do not know how it will perform on most mobile systems, but again, in theory, it should work or otherwise be relatively easy to fix. Here is the source code with more information:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

You can also enter any HTML you want there, like to create buttons or divs or anything you want. Examples can be loaded by imported the text below into the editor using "Import and Merge" and then you can click "List all IDs" and select an item like "polar clock" to view it below (that example is a graphical clock, written by someone else using D3):
https://raw.githubusercontent....

A different approach to doing something like that if you are willing to host a NodeJS server somewhere is this other code I wrote:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

However, if you go that route, there are quite a few web services that support remote coding through the browser on hosted platforms. For example, "Cloud 9":
https://c9.io/

BTW, my own current work on all that, just checked in a new update to a version of the Pointrel System yesterday which I am please with conceptually. I use it here:
    https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

But the main repository for that version of the Pointrel System is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

It has ideas in it that could be useful for a Simple Federated Wiki like Ward is working towards and other knowledge sharing tools beyond that. At the core of this version of the system is the idea is document "envelopes" which wrap JSON objects and supply indexed metadata including arbitrary triples and also supply a document ID, where you can post new versions of a document with later timestamps to change the indexing of them or the content. This is just my own twist on a lot of ideas that have been running around for a long time (including in CouchDB, MongoDB, RDF, Wikis, git, and my own previous work). Inspiration often ping-pongs back and forth between people or indirectly across networks.

Anyway, I'd say Ward Cunningham's "Wiki Way" feels somewhat more like Stallman's ideals than O'Reilly's "Open Source" ideals, even if it is different in its own way.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWay
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheWiki...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

However, there are truths to what all of these people have to say from their different perspectives, whether about ideology, practice within pragmatic current politics, or community tools. It can be hard to put them all together.

Hard to imagine so little real discussion on this on Slashdot if this article had been posted ten years ago. So much has changed in some ways. For an alternative view of what happened that blames Tim O'Reilly (perhaps too strongly?), see this long article by Evgeny Morozov, a part of which is below:
"The Meme Hustler: Tim O'Reilly's crazy talk"
http://www.thebaffler.com/arti...
"While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are "disrupting" whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don't mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral. ...
    However, it's not his politics that makes O'Reilly the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley; a burgeoning enclave of Randian thought, it brims with far nuttier cases. O'Reilly's mastery of public relations, on the other hand, is unrivaled and would put many of Washington's top spin doctors to shame. No one has done more to turn important debates about technology--debates that used to be about rights, ethics, and politics--into kumbaya celebrations of the entrepreneurial spirit while making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject. As O'Reilly discovered a long time ago, memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.The Randian undertones in O'Reilly's thinking are hard to miss, even as he flaunts his liberal credentials. "There's a way in which the O'Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world," he wrote in 2012. But it's not just the hacker as hero that O'Reilly is so keen to celebrate. His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword. Hiding beneath this glossy veneer of disruption-talk is the same old gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism that we associate with Randian characters. For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness. ...
    It was the growing popularity of "open source software" that turned O'Reilly into a national (and, at least in geek circles, international) figure. "Open source software" was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O'Reilly. This is where he tested all his trademark discursive interventions: hosting a summit to define the concept, penning provocative essays to refine it, producing a host of books and events to popularize it, and cultivating a network of thinkers to proselytize it. ...
    Underpinning Stallman's project was a profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity. Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading or biometric identification presented no major mysteries.
    Stallman is highly idiosyncratic, to put it mildly, and there are many geeks who don't share his agenda. Plenty of developers contributed to "free software" projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
    Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software, many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999, while Stallman's manifesto "read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise." Stallman's rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman didn't care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association.
    By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet--the Open Source Initiative--and brought in O'Reilly to help them rebrand. The timing was right. Netscape had just marked its capitulation to Microsoft in the so-called Browser Wars and promised both that all future versions of Netscape Communicator would be released free of charge and that its code would also be made publicly available. A few months later, O'Reilly organized a much-publicized summit, where a number of handpicked loyalists--Silicon democracy in action!--voted for "open source" as their preferred label. Stallman was not invited. ...
    Even before the coup, O'Reilly occupied an ambiguous--and commercially pivotal--place in the free software community. On the one hand, he published manuals that helped to train new converts to the cause. On the other hand, those manuals were pricey. They were also of excellent quality, which, as Stallman once complained, discouraged the community from producing inexpensive alternatives. Ultimately, however, the disagreement between Stallman and O'Reilly--and the latter soon became the most visible cheerleader of the open source paradigm--probably had to do with their very different roles and aspirations. Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate. O'Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O'Reilly books and events, especially at a time when some analysts were beginning to worry--and for good reason, as it turned out--that the tech industry was about to collapse.In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda. As Raymond himself put it in 1999, "what we needed to mount was in effect a marketing campaign," one that "would require marketing techniques (spin, image-building, and re-branding) to make it work." This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined. Instead, it put all the emphasis on how it was pursuing those ends--in an extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination. In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component. According to Raymond, "open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It's an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results." O'Reilly concurred. "I don't think it's a religious issue. It's really about how do we actually encourage and spark innovation," he announced a decade later. While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
    The coup succeeded. Stallman's project was marginalized. But O'Reilly and his acolytes didn't win with better arguments; they won with better PR. To make his narrative about open source software credible to a public increasingly fascinated by the Internet, O'Reilly produced a highly particularized account of the Internet that subsequently took on a life of its own. In just a few years, that narrative became the standard way to talk about Internet history, giving it the kind of neat intellectual coherence that it never actually had. A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O'Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform. ...
    All the familiar pathologies of O'Reilly's thinking are on full display in his quest to meme-engineer his way to "Government 2.0." The free software scenario is repeating itself: deeply political reform efforts are no longer seen as "moral crusades," but are reinvented as mere attempts at increasing efficiency and promoting innovation. ...
    By the early 2000s, as O'Reilly and his comrades were celebrating open source as a new revolutionary approach to everything, their discussions wandered into debates about the future of governance. Thus, a term like "open government"--which, until then, had mostly been used as a synonym for "transparent and accountable government"--was reinvented as a shortened version of "open source government." The implication of this subtle linguistic change was that the main cultural attributes of open source software--the availability of the source code for everyone's inspection, the immense contribution it can make to economic growth, the new decentralized production model that relies on contributions from numerous highly distributed participants--were to displace older criteria like "transparency" or "accountability" as the most desirable attributes of open government. The coining of the "open government" buzzwords was meant to produce a very different notion of openness. ..."

I just saw that article today while looking at stuff connected to Ward Cunningham's most recent Simple Federated Wiki work and Ted Nelson's earlier hypertext work of Xanadu and ideas in Computer Lib / Dream Machines.
http://found.tumblr.com/post/4...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

This was surprising by Ward:
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?Wik...
"After twenty years of service I'm pleased to announce a complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application with a distributed database which will last us for at least 20 years, maybe 200. see http://c2.fed.wiki.org/ We've recently endured abuse that has moved our conversion date forward before we were fully prepared. I apologize for this. Expect the new to be well aligned with the capabilities of the modern internet with plenty of opportunity for participation that was not possible before. Thank you all. "

A starting point for the source:
https://github.com/WardCunning...

The first checkins to github are about six months after I posted this to the C2 Wiki talking about a design for a Peer-to-peer distributed Wiki for the Pointrel system I've long been working on: :-)
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Pointre...

Although no doubt others have had similar thoughts back to Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Vannevar Bush and so on. Anyway, just trying to end this comment on a more positive note. There may be an ebb and flow of social feelings, and clearly the commercial exchange economy has been ascendent the past few decades, but we may see advanced subsistence production and gift giving via the internet and democratic planning make a comeback to bring things back into balance. I feel we are already seeing those other trends blossom. "Interesting times"...

Very insightful: https://www.quantamagazine.org...
"Carmi Turchick says: February 13, 2015 at 9:30 am
    Agree with Ratcliff's last statement. The issue is considerably more complicated in humans than in bacteria, and even in bacteria one needs to consider how hostile the environment is. What is astonishing about most of the PD literature is how it claims to examine evolution but never mentions the environment. A hostile environment, as Dugatkin showed, selects for more cooperation. The free-living bacteria that under drought convictions form a colony that creates a stalk and spores are an example and they point to the next error, which is assuming a reward is always available no matter the actions of the players. This is not how nature works. If too few of the bacteria cooperate, no stalk is made, no spores are released, all of the bacteria have a fitness of zero. Similarly in humans there are many times when obtaining any reward requires N number of individuals to cooperate, and often that number is unknowable. Nine of us might kill that elephant, or it might be one or two or three too few to get it done resulting in nothing for all of us. Even with two partners, if you selfishly fail to cut off the monkey's escape route he gets away and we both go hungry. Think I will go hunting with you again? Which brings up yet another issue; avoiding detection and the cost of being detected. PD assumes that the cost of defecting is limited to a partner picking defect in the next round. Some models allow partners to punish a player at a significant cost to themselves or to move to another partner, but even these fall well short of what we see in human groups. As described by Boehm in "Heirarchy in the Forest," those whose selfish behavior is detected face collective punishment by the group, costing each group member very little, which ranges from social shunning to being murdered by one's own family or abandoned and left alone by the group. The power in a group of cooperators belongs to the cooperators and not the defectors, as cooperators work together to thwart defectors but defectors by definition cannot gang up on cooperators in return. As PD examines interactions with two parties, if the cooperator is paired with a defector or extorter they have no one to cooperate with. But in a group they have plenty of cooperative partners while the selfish stand alone. This imbalance of power means that the opportunities to defect are extremely limited as one must avoid detection, a situation which favors cooperation as the dominant and more numerous strategy. Finally, in group social territorial species having and defending a territory is an all or nothing issue with N number required to keep neighbors from taking your land and killing everyone. Either all of you have land and lives or none of you have land and at the very least few men and children survive. So we see that fairly often the "reward" for defecting is actually not 3 or whatever number is randomly chosen, but instead it is nothing, or loss of social status, or it is death for the individual, or death for the individual and all their relatives."

"By that yardstick, we're post-scarcity now, since the problems with supplying essentials to everybody are basically political, not technical or economic."

Yes, exactly. And it has been that way for some time. And if all that energy spent propping up a social order based on artificial scarcity (e.g the Iraq war) was instead, say, creating fusion energy (US$3 trillion incurred on Iraq would have brought us pretty close...) we'd be able to go way beyond the basics for everyone.

That's the paradigm shift that could happen. It's what James P. Hogan explores in his novel "Voyage from Yesteryear", maybe with some overly rosy glasses about decentralization but still a good read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
"The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, capitalism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict."

As I wrote in this essay, abundance for all essentially comes from multiply technological progress times social progress. So, with social progress, what technology you have can do a lot more, and vice versa.
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
https://groups.google.com/foru...

Realizing how fragile our civilization is on this planet (given solar flares, supervolcanos, asteroid strikes, climate change, plagues, and so on including all the things in the original story) is one motivator for people to put more effort into cooperation and less effort into conflict.

BTW, an "endless pool" is (I hear) really great for convenient swimming, and a lot cheaper than most beach front property. :-)
http://www.endlesspools.com/

The thing is, as soon as you state what specific you are trying to accomplish (exercise, sunshine, storage space, time in nature), rather than what specific thing you want (mansion on a beach), there are probably lots of creative paths to obtain that in ways that everyone could also do. As another example, yes, there may be only one original "Mona Lisa" painting (or maybe a few similar ones by the same artist), but if you want a pleasant painting on the wall to look at, or are willing to accept a copy of a well known painting, that is relatively easy to achieve in material terms.

So, even if actual Earthly current beachfront property is scarce relative to the demand at a price of "free" (I have to concede that), opportunities for exercise, being in nature, or having beautiful experiences are readily available to most people (or could be).

A mainstream academic economics department is in some ways essentially a modern theocracy.

The book "Disciplined Minds" helps explain the social dynamic behind that (which applies to some extent in most graduate programs, but may be most extreme in some like economics these days):
    http://disciplinedminds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
    In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
    Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Supporting examples include "The Market as God": http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
    Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. ..."

And "The Mythology of Wealth": http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Justifications for elites and social hierarchy goes all the way back to the pharaohs. For 6000 years, society has organized itself into social classes. The people who do the work are always in the lower classes. The harder and nastier the work, the lower down in the social order you sink. The people who don't do this work must justify their position. They do it by establishing their "worthiness", and a variety of cultural devices have been concocted over the millennia to accomplish this. The pharaohs, you may recall, weren't people at all. They were gods. Roman emperors likewise had themselves deified, and before that Roman Senators justified their position as "patricians". Basically, "my great great granddaddy was a big shot, therefore I should be too."
    The middle ages gave us the notion of the "great chain of being". Outside the earthly realm - in the realm of myth , that is - there is Jesus and the "heavenly host". Just below the angels and saints is the king, followed by his entourage of muscle men otherwise known as the "nobility". Since kings were chosen "by the grace of God", they didn't answer to ordinary mortals. At least they didn't before Runnymeade, when the English nobility straightened out King John about where his power really came from.
    This is the historical background for those famous words of Thomas Jefferson. "Governments are instituted among men, and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". Everyone has heard those words. School children recite them. Few people appreciate that those words repudiated 6000 years of mumbo-jumbo to justify the existence of social classes and fixed elites. Elites don't get their power from the gods, or from Jesus or from any other mythological source. Elites get their power from the people they rule. Power flows from the bottom up, not from the top down.
    Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites.
    That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology. ..."

And a plea by some academics struggling against this economic theocracy:
http://www.responsiblefinance....
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."

By more economics students:
http://www.isipe.net/open-lett...
http://www.universityworldnews...
"It is not only the world economy that is in crisis. The teaching of economics is in crisis too, and this crisis has consequences far beyond the university walls. What is taught shapes the minds of the next generation of policymakers, and therefore shapes the societies we live in. We, over 65 associations of economics students from over 30 different countries, believe it is time to reconsider the way economics is taught. We are dissatisfied with the dramatic narrowing of the curriculum that has taken place over the last couple of decades. This lack of intellectual diversity does not only restrain education and research. It limits our ability to contend with the multidimensional challenges of the 21st century - from financial stability, to food security and climate change. The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. Such change will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society's problems can be generated."

And:
"They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07...
" But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded." "

"Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal"
http://www.amazon.com/Economic...
"At a time when growing numbers of people are deeply anxious about the workings of our economy--and when our very future as a society is up for grabs--economist Moshe Adler offers a lively and accessible debunking of two elements that make economics the "science" of the rich: the definition of what is efficient and the theory of how wages are determined. Filled with lively examples, from food riots in Indonesia to the eminent domain in Connecticut and everyone from Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham to Larry Summers, here is a bold and important book that offers a foundation for a fundamentally more just economic system."

And also:
"Mainstream economics, heterodoxy and academic exclusion: a review essay"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
"Does the mainstream of economic thinking and analysis tend systematically to exclude ideas and approaches that could enrich the field, and, as a consequence, have important questions and issues been shunted aside for nonobjective reasons? Two recent volumes by heterodox economists that address these questions are Geoffrey Hodgson's How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science, and Steve Keen's Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. I evaluate their claims of academic exclusion and assess the current state of (selective) pluralism within mainstream economics."

Anyway, these are examples of the ideological power creating and sustaining artificial scarcity at this point as a sort of intellectual neo-feudalism. As Bob Black suggests:
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

A bunch of economic alternatives I've collected:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...

You bring up an important issue. However, in practice, the most common way large numbers of people tent to become underfed, uneducated, and victims of slave culture ideology (religion being complex topic) is from things like colonialism and militarism actively destroying real abundance and healthy cultures in a quest for some dysfunctional imbalance.

For example, consider what happened when Columbus came to the Americas:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.... ... When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island. ..."

Contrast with what Marshall Sahlins said about most hunter/gathers:
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

Also related:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"Peace makes plenty.
Plenty makes pride.
Pride breeds dispute.
Poverty's the fruit.
Poverty makes peace."

But that poem from the 14th century (!) is a very different take on things than saying scarcity or want or ignorance is a natural state of being...

Still, even in such cases as you describe with billions of people under subjugation, people (in aggregate) are always thinking of new ideas about their situation and new ways of doing things, and improving their skills and sharing ideas. It takes a lot to shut that growth process down.

For a current example, consider all the effort of groups like by RIAA and similar groups through political lobbying to create more artificial scarcity (e.g. The Sonny Bono / Micky Mouse copyright extension act). These restrictive efforts now ensure people can in theory do more jail time and get bigger fines for sharing (copyrighted) information like a few inspirational songs than if they had committed murder. See for example:
"Seven Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fine than File-Sharing"
http://www.prefixmag.com/news/...

Yet, as Richard Stallman says, sharing is the basis of community and civilization. When I was born, there were essentially no criminal penalties for copyright infringement, only civil ones which required civil lawsuits at the copyright holder's expense. The criminalization of copyright violation and significant police involvement was a big change over the past couple decades. However, people are still responding in various creative ways, with GNU/etc/Linux and Create Commons licensed content and Wikipedia and Slashdot discussions and so on.

Much of early US American prosperity was built on using ideas covered by patents and texts covered by copyrights from Europe without paying any royalties. There was also a great benefit to US American agriculture from the huge agricultural genetic diversity created by immigrants to the USA bringing in all sorts of plants and animals with them.

And of course, countries like China or India essentially ignore many US patents or copyrights. Like is suggested here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Creat...
"Frederick Noronha a journalist in India: "There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?" "

As I say elsewhere, people may consume resources and take up space, but they also produce resources and create spaces worth being in. Likewise, people may spread misinformation, but they can also discover and spread useful information. It takes a lot to keep billions of people down.

See also the 1950s sc-fi story by Theodore Sturgeon "The Skills of Xanadu" for another take on what mobile computing is making possible. It is the story that is part of what inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext (he coined the term in 1963) and the "Xanadu" project, and hypertext underpins the World Wide Web.
https://archive.org/details/pr...

You can download a Palm Beach Hotel and beachfront here: http://www.planetminecraft.com...

Or, if you want something less virtual, consider working towards seasteading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Or large space habitats:
http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov...

And of course, there is also "the Matrix" of "the Holodeck" for immersive reality beyond what Minecraft offers (not there yet, but maybe we are?)

Each of those ideas is a product of the imagination... Even if some have yet to be realized, or may never be.

So, yes, you can have what you want, today, with Minecraft, thanks to a lot of imaginative people (including Inifiniminer by Zachary Barth, a big inspiration behind Minecraft). Should we have declared all those imaginative people surplus at birth out of some fear there was not enough to go around? People may consume resources and they may crowd places, it's true, but people also can create resources and can create places worth being in.

Now, after my having said this, you may put more qualifiers on your request to be contrary perhaps and say a beach front hotel in Minecraft virtual reality is not what you mean. However, then you are not engaging in a playful spirit and you are to some extent creating your own artificial scarcity and artificial unhappiness for yourself compared to a lot of interesting experiences you can have right now. As far as the basics (and including a computer that can run Minecraft and so on) there is plenty to go around on planet Earth for billions of humans. And with a little bit of effort, we could create enough land (and beachfront property) for quadrillions of people. Just like the Dutch created habitable land from the sea, future humans can create habitable land from space resources.

For some inspiration on what might be possible, see Iain Bank's "Culture" novels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Anyway, will there still be conflicts and scarcities, even with abundance? Sure. Humans compete with each other for all sorts of reasons, including for the attention of specific people nearby (and including as part of a mating dance for relative status, see for example James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear"). But by the time we are talking about those sorts of scarcities, we are way beyond the sort of material scarcity most mainstream economics assumes.

BTW, various jobs are listed here at Palm Beach area hotels if you want to be around that physical ambiance right now:
http://www.hotelforcepalmbeach...

After all, how many rooms of a mansion can one person physically occupy at one time? And an empty mansion at night with you as the only occupant can seem kind of creepy and lonely and even boring...

that no one expected: http://www.homestead.afrc.af.m...
"For the individuals laying eyes on the base for the first time since the storm, reconciling what they were seeing seemed impossible.
    "Those things that have been a part of your life for so long, I guess you take for granted that they're always going to be there," said Mr. Tom Miller, currently with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron and during Hurricane Andrew was the electrical shop chief with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron as an Air Reserve Technician. Mr. Miller was living in Cutler Bay at the time of the hurricane and weathered the storm in St. Petersburg. He's been a member of the base since 1968.
    "The most vivid memories I have are when I first went back to where I lived and when I first went back to the base because that was where I lived and worked," he said. "Those are the things that you get some strength from, and then to come back and see that area was completely devastated, that really hits you. The devastation seemed insurmountable." ...
  For those who've seen both the before and after of the storm, 20 years means different things to different people. "Sometimes it feels like it was 200 years ago and then other times it feels like it was last week," said Miller. "When I came back on base after the storm, a place where I had worked for 20 years, I just thought, 'what's the answer for this?'; 'where do we even start?' We learned a big lesson: these things can change people's lives overnight. The base has come back, and I'm glad it did.""

For another example, one week my mother was living in a nice house and was a smiling teenager. The next week, her home town looked like this due to WWII fighting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Or, as Howard Zinn said:
http://www.thenation.com/artic...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
      I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
    There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. ..."

See also my other comment to a different story here on different sorts of existential societal risks and possible solutions: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Humans these days have been so blessed with so much including a relatively mild climate the past few centuries compared to the past. It is only because of that blessing that our thoughts can focus on internal conflicts of human vs. human instead of the greater eternal conflict of human vs. a capricious environment. We need to invest more in dealing with such environmental existential risks.

It is just foolish, even laughable, that the USA can, say, spend US$1 trillion a year or more on the US military including incurred future costs related to human political conflicts (many of which the USA helped create) while our infrastructure falls apart and we don't invest in, say, protecting our power grid from solar flares, or that we don't scale our medical systems to deal with possible pandemics, or we don't move to indoor or even underground agriculture faster to get it out of harms way of the weather. On that last:
http://www.ibtimes.com/indoor-...

We can get so wrapped up in our fears about human conflicts we just seem to forget as a nation all the other existential risks out there -- including from "want and ignorance".
http://www.cedmagic.com/featur...
"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."

I can wonder if the Homestead AFB Hurricane experience is one reason the US military is so concerned about climate change?
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
"Climate change does not respect borders and we must work together to fight its threats. These are not the words of a tree-hugger, but the US Department of Defense. ..."

We all need some security. The issue is how we go about getting it individually and collectively, as I discuss here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

See: http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

In general, as Julian Simon wrote, the (educated, nourished, healthy) human imagination is the ultimate resource that invents all other resources, so in general the more people you have, the more imagination you have. For example, woudl we have the internet if someone in the 1600s had decided there were too many people because London was overcrowded and killed off all but a million humans on the planet? The solar system can probably support quadrillions of people living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore like JD Bernal imagined in the 1920s.
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That list is very similar to what I had listed here in back in 1999 (minus a few fanciful ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
        Autonomous military robots out of control
        Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
        Ethnically targeted virus
        Sterility virus
        Computer virus
        Asteroid impact
        Y2K
        Other unforseen computer failure mode
        Global warming / climate change / flooding
        Nuclear / biological war
        Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
        Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
        Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
        Religious / philosophical warfare
        Economic imbalance leading to world war
        Arms race leading to world war
        Zero-point energy tap out of control
        Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
        Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)"

But in the end, I think the issue raised in my sig is the biggest challenge: the perilous irony of people using the tools of material abundance in a war-like way as if material scarcity was still a major concern, as well as derivative issues like the moral problem of creating artificial scarcity under capitalism and so on. There are possible solutions to such issues (basic income, expanded gift economy, improved subsistence via 3D printing and personal agricultural robots and indoor agriculture and solar panels and so on, participatory democratic planning supported by the internet), but ideology and existing artificial-scarcity-based power structures stands in the way. Still, the dominant ideology is slowly shifting top a more open and abundance-oriented one. As Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...

Not sure why it was modded down to zero. Very insightful. For all we know, there are many ancient communities on Earth and elsewhere living that way already. Even though I have written in the past about "refugia" for humans (see my website and grad student plans from the 1980s) I agree that swarms of AI probes could scour Earth (even underground eventually) and most things in space would be visible and approachable (including by high velocity kinetic weapons). So, I've come around to thinking the the best way to have a happy singularity is for humans to get our social house in order before then, because the direction we take coming out of a singularity may have a lot to do with out path into it. Thus I'm for a basic income, an expanded gift economy, increased subsistence, internet-enhanced democratic planning, and so on.

I grew up as a kid watching Sealab 2020 which I loved. Somewhere in the late 1980s I sent a letter to a Navy Admiral about making self-reliant undersea bases, but never heard back. I won a Navy Science Award for a high school robot project and had sent it to the admiral who had signed the letter. An interesting related book about the reality of living underwater (although personally I feel both in the ocean and space humans will just stay in structures or work pods and rarely try to go out in special protective clothing):
http://benhellwarth.com/
"SEALAB is like the underwater Right Stuff: The story of how a gutsy group of U.S. Navy divers and scientists set out to develop the marine equivalent of space stations -- and forever changed manâ(TM)s relationship to the sub-aquatic world. ..."

BTW, on evading "detection" -- there are layers there. If you think about the human immune system, things can be "detected" but they may only be acted on if they seem like a threat (especially given limited resources and multiple real pressing threats including internal issues).

Read the first prologue part of Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep" for some related thoughts on resisting powerful growing AIs. I quote from that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
""Of course [the humans] suspect. But what can they do? It's an old evil they've awakened. Till it's ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every message from home."
Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they used. The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than anything humans could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife. The the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard underground. So confident the humans, a little village they had made there.
"Still," though the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the craziest outs, "we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us."
"The evil is young, barely three days old."
"Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a great evil in this archive."
"Perhaps they found *two*."
"Or an antidote." Whatever else, the overness was missing some things, and misinterpreting others. "While we exist, when we exist, we should do what we can." ... "

But perhaps the deepest wrongness these days is what I mention in my sig -- the ironic perils of the tools of abundance (like nuclear energy, AI, robotics, nanotech, biotech, bureaucracy, etc.) in the hands of those still fighting over perceived scarcity). Think of all those Navy subs, powered by relatively clean safe nuclear reactors, ready on political command to use other arrangements of nuclear energy to destroy all of human life as we know it on Planet Earth for petty and short-sighted conflicts over oil profits... It would be hilarious if it was not so deadly serious.

See also my "OSCMOAK: ideas (going back to the 1980s) for a better way -- although the Maker movement is busy working towards surpassing those ideas, although still lacks a common standard for encoding webs of manufacturing information one could use to design resilient sustainable self-replicating infrastructures.