So what happens when we design an economy that doesn't need money?

Who's we? People with money aren't going to give up their power over other people. And those other people aren't going to give up their chance to become the oppressors themselves, even if the chance is purely hypothetical; American elections are proof enough of that.

Human evil is one problem technology can't overcome.

The part being copied would have to be something that is unavailable otherwise and/or very costly to be worth the time/effort to counterfeit it with a 3D printer.

Spare parts and specialty tools. I constantly find myself needing some weirdly shaped piece of plastic that's impossible to find anywhere.

Jewelry? Too much scrutiny applied there, too.

You do realize some people wear jewelry as ornamentation, and thus don't care if it has the right density of defects visible only when viewed with an electron microscope?

If you are truly so ignorant to believe that the US moon landing is fake explain why we have been able to bounce lasers off specific spots on the moon since the late 60s.

Because Moon is a giant disco ball covered in space dust. The mirrored surface shines through in some places.

You are trying to replace humans, not Vulcans. Kirk ran the missions better than Spock because he could identify better with illogical and petty aliens.

Kirk ran the missions better because the writers were flattering the audience. In reality a rational machine will simply learn how humans actually react, not how they should react according to logic/economics/whatever.

Economics isn't pseudoscience.

Most of the time, economics is simply various economists or think tanks pushing policies advantageous to their patron's ideological or financial goals. So it's not even pseudoscience, but flat-out astrology.

Before the programmer who is automating job X is laid off, the person currently performing job X will be laid off due to the new program. Programmers will outlast the positions they are automating.

A lot of positions require learning algorithms. Once you have those, what's stopping them from learning whole new jobs without programmer's intervention?

If I were the author, I'd worry less about the programmer and more about how this world will handle the potential mass unemployment situation.

It has run up huge debts in a desperate attempt to keep demand up, and is now collapsing under them. It's not a "potential situation", we've had unemployment and underpaid workers for decades and now the bill is in the mail.

A better question is what'll replace it: will general desperation allow communism to rise up again for round two, or will someone come up with something new?

The possibility that intelligent aliens who are pacifistic cannot be ruled out.

Then they won't last long after meeting up with us.

Because a peaceful species would be jealous about our chance to die in a ditch or nuclear fireball, and seek to imitate us?

If anything, we'd be used as a cautionary example of playing with powers we can't control.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

Problem is, the bad guy gets at least a few shots by surprise, and then there's the next incident, and the next, and... Bad Guy With Gun is an enemy you can never beat by shooting.

Aggression is ultimately what gets people out of bed in the morning instead of just remaining immobile and dying of thirst.

No, it's the thirst. What do you think people are - Sith Lords?

"Use your aggressive feelings. Let the * flow through your * !"

If something isn't aggressive it isn't alive or soon wont be.

That depends on just what is meant by aggression. Mr. Hawking is talking about nuclear war, so he likely referred to the popular meaning which implies force or at least hostility. And you seem to be equating any and all "energy" with it.

Leaders are aggressive.

Leader is whoever people follow. If they do so because he's aggressive, there's usually going to be trouble.

I don't really understand what definition you are using to consider threads closures, though.

The standard one: a function with associated environment. An OS scheduler resuming a thread means it's basically resuming a closure representing that thread. When the thread ceases running - for example by calling "yield()", or having an interrupt occur - the system creates a new closure composed of a pointer to the next instruction (essentially treating it as a lambda function) and associated environment (the thread stack) and puts it into the run list (or appropriate waiting list).

Here is a cooperative multithreading monad I made in Haskell which utilizes exactly this pattern. And here is some test code.

RNG Gods hate you

Just make an offering of entropy and they'll be unpredictable again.

Yes, Java it can delegate different jobs to different threads; but then you need to read up on ExecutorServices.

Are you really counting "needs to read the documentation" as a negative for Java in the context of professional software development? Seriously?

On a 32 bit machine, it doesn't make much difference, but on a 64 bit machine, address space is not a scarce resource so for practical purposes the stack is only 4k. Still bigger than a serialised closure.

Threads are closures. The question the developer is faced with is: use manual closures with all the work that involves, or use closures with hardware support for resuming them (threads) with the inflexibility of data structure alignment and uncertainty of just when and in what order the closures are resumed.

Of course, a cooperative multithreading library might be the best of both worlds.