Interesting thoughts, Michael(?). I agree that some trends in Japan may foreshadow things the USA does (even the Japanese banking crisis decades ago related to rel estate bubbles leading to stagnation).

Thanks for your book link, which also has a link to a related site which includes connecting current challenges with historical developments:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...
"I have spent a couple decades writing a book about human ecology, because it is drastically changing, which presents great danger and great potential. The idea is to describe both so that we can avoid the disasters and take advantage of the potentials. The problems I describe could end human civilization, but the only way to avoid the disasters is to adapt to a new ecology, like the title of the book says. About 10,000 years or so ago, we started leaving the ecology we had grown up in for millions of years. Right now we are in an ecology that is one transient ecology of many that we have been moving through. We need to find one that is stable and that we can live in long term or we are, well, a specie without an ecology is in trouble. If we do not create a stable ecology that is some form of civilization, well, it is going to look like one of those "Post Apocalyptic" movies. It will not be pleasant and it will be hard for humans to ever really be much more than animals. The thing is that it is not just about finding a new ecology, it is also about adapting to survive and be comfortable in it. We are still mostly adapted to the old ecology when we lived in tribes and we need to change to adapt to the new ecology. It is a lot of things. We need to be smarter and more comfortable in a civilization than we are. That is what the books are about. In the mean time, this web site is supposed to serve a few other purposes and offer other resources. It is especially to present discussions about how different points of view can be understood."

Just spending a few minutes so far looking at your site and book blurb, in scope, it reminds me of "Beyond Civilization" by Daniel Quinn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

It also reminds me a bit of "A New Way Of Thinking" which you may find of interest:
http://www.anwot.org/

You have a synopsis here that mentions genetic issues:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...

Certainly evolutionary pressures need to be understood (I was in a PHD program in ecology and evolution for a time). But in the time scale of a transition to some new economy full of AI and robots as capable as most humans for most economic activities (twenty years?) these seem to me to not be pressing issues, whatever the long term may hold. You might also find of interest Freeman Dyson's speculations about genetic engineering as far as possible long term trends in designer biology.
http://www.nybooks.com/article...

On genetics and health, while mutations and birth defects are serious issues, it seems to me the most pressing current health issues relate to vitamin D deficiency, diet lacking in enough vegetables and fruits and with too many refined carbohydrates and artificial additives, too much bad stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of community, problematical infrastructure, and so on (see "Blue Zones" for example).

You also wrote on your site: "In my broad studies, I had to examine the Philosophy of Science. One interesting point is about how science is advanced. Is it by a team of researchers or by individuals. It is a contested point, but I think it is clear that it is by both. Still, in the balance, the contributions by individuals like Newton and Einstein show the power of individual inspiration. That is the path I have taken. "

I certainly appreciate the value of individual explorations. However, as far as the team aspect of research in this area, I feel it would be great to have some sort of better communication system so people could collaborate on exploring this space of ideas in a distributed and "stygmergic" way under free licenses. Something beyond a wiki or, as right now, Slashdot (as useful as it is). A social semantic desktop? I've been working towards something like that on and off. This test "Twirlip" website is not quite it, but it includes some explorations in that direction, such as this clustering diagram / concept map contrasting an author with a scarcity world view (Catton) with an author with an abundance world view (Simon):
http://www.twirlip.com/pointre...

Personally, my own life would be little different -- except for a big change of not engaging in bouts of unrelated paid employment for expenses. I'd still spend time with my kid and homeschool. I'd still work on free software like the Pointrel system or software related to my wife's free book. I'd still work towards organizing all manufacturing knowledge (OSCOMAK) and work towards designing self-replicating space habitats. I'd hopefully be doing all those software and hardware things a lot better and a lot faster because I'd have more time (without taking on unrelated employment, even as I'd still be happy to help out on other projects just to be helpful and exchange ideas, same as helping any neighbor). I'd probably have lab space for physical experiments which would also speed things up. Another speed boost would (hopefully) be lots of like minded peers who were free to do similar things who I could collaborate with -- including on simulating and building and running free automated tire production factories as I posted on yesterday, especially since people will probably still need tires, even in space habitats: :-)
"Automated FOSS tire plant ideas; simulation tools? "
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I'd probably feel less compelled to do those things quickly though, so I might do more gardening. I'd still help out with my local historical society.

I think most people could find interesting things to do. It might take some period of "deworking" to make the transition. For kids leaving public school to do "unschooling" (or even just plain homeschooling) a rule of thumb is that it takes at least one month for every month in school to make a transition to independent learning. So, for someone who has worked at a conventional job for a dozen years on top of a dozen years of schooling, it might take a couple years for him or her to start to regain some independent initiative.

I feel it likely a lot of people would just have the time to be better parents, better friends, better neighbors, and better family members. As Bob Black wrote in his essay on "The Abolition of Work":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!" "

Is it any wonder you want to avoid such desperate people? Even if most of them are doing a heroic job of trying to hold everything together despite limited time? And the flip side of it is, the people in the USA with lots of spare time, they tend to either be those who are (inherited) wealthy parasites who accept or ignore the huge rich/poor divide or they are people who are poor or old/tired or disabled or mentally ill. Obviously, I'm exaggerating here -- but not by that much. People in Western Europe are more likely to have free time and be able to use it to be better companions and more involved citizens and volunteers.
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/...
http://newint.org/features/201...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

This is not to dismiss the value of "work" though. As E.F. Schumacher said:
http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

For that reason, despite what Socrates said, one who does not "work" in some sense (even at parenting or volunteering or education) may also not make a great companion. That is a reasonable concern about robots doing everything. A wrose worry is this (learned about via Slashdot):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ''to serve and obey and guard men from harm". Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids."

I think it also possible many people would get caught in "pleasure traps" related to "supernormal stimuli", especially at first. No doubt there would be whole new professions in helping such people. Related:
"Supernormal Stimuli & The Pleasure Trap (Score:5, Informative)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

But there are always risks, no matter what we do. A technologically empowered society is more likely to survive planetary disasters -- perhaps at the risk of causing them.

I think a basic income could help with a transition to a post-scarcity gift economy. It could be tax funded (like Social Security) and/or government-owned resource rental funded (like the Alaska Permanent fund). That money would then provide what you need to buy stuff robots produce or to travel to places people claimed they owned the land or buildings. Fiat currencies like dollars could still work in such a scenario -- at least as well as they work now.

Hunters and gatherers pretty much lived the life you described you'd want. Is it any wonder humans would feel drawn to such a lifestyle?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
"By stepping away from western notions of affluence, the theory of the original affluent society thus dispels notions about hunter-gatherer societies that were popular at the time of the symposium. Sahlins states that hunter-gatherers have a "marvelously varied diet"[3] based on the abundance of the local flora and fauna. This demonstrates that hunter-gatherers do not exist on a mere subsistence economy but rather live among plenty. Through knowledge of their environment hunter-gatherers are able to change what foreigners may deem as meager and unreliable natural resources into rich subsistence resources. Through this they are able to effectively and efficiently provide for themselves and minimize the amount of time spent procuring food. "[T]he food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not know what to do with themselves".[3] Hunter-gatherers also experience "affluence without abundance"[3] as they simply meet their required ends and do not require surplus nor material possessions (as these would be a hindrance to their nomadic lifestyle). The lack of surplus also demonstrates that they trust their environment will continuously provide for them. By foraging only for their immediate needs among plentiful resources, hunter-gatherers are able to increase the amount of leisure time available to them. Thus, despite living in what western society deems to be material poverty, hunter-gatherer societies work less than people practicing other modes of subsistence while still providing for all their needs, and therefore increase their amount of leisure time. These are the reasons the original affluent society is that of the hunter-gatherer.[3]"

So, the way forward may be to circle back to the past -- at least the better parts.

By the way, for a humorous twist on all this from the 1950s, read "The Midas Plague" found in "Midas World" by Frederik Pohl:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. [I removed the spoiler of the ending...]"

BTW, in the story, Morey Fry hates watching the entertainment robots he is forced to watch to make his consumption quota. :-)

If you are interested in more ideas in this general area, "The World Transformed" (formerly FastForward Radio) is an internet radio series that examines many ideas about robotics and abundance and post-scarcity. There are about 400 podcast episodes by now, including interviewing people like Ray Kurzweil. I've been on it twice myself as a panelist.
http://worldtransformed.com/

... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas.
http://focusfusion.org/index.p...

As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

But, imaginative people still need some form of life support to grow and have time to do stuff, and lab equipment is (not yet) free.

Of course, AIs will no doubt get more imaginative over time, too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.

I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...

Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limited and technology's ability to act an an amplifier continues to grow exponentially.

So that's why I feel fustakrakich could be right. Well, that and I've said much the same thing for decades -- generally to my own detriment because it makes me sound like a loony. :-) From what I wrote around 1988:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction."

Still working on it about 30 years later... Very slow progress, sorry... :-)

You seem to me to be aiming to imply "involuntary" within an arbitrary legal framework where the person who first twiddled some bits together can control what others later do with that set of bits. I'm assuming you are implying that those other people sharing the original pattern further without permission is "involuntary" sharing by the person who first put the pattern together. I guess I can see that perspective on "sharing", even if it is defining "sharing" in a way that emphasizes (using contract law) the preferences of the original creator over the preferences of any current holders of a copy of the bit sequence.

If you have a digital copy of a recent song released under a typical commercial license, it is illegal in the USA to give a copy of that song to someone else (maybe with some fair use exceptions). You have a local copy of something, but the law says you can't share it with those who want or need it based on the license chosen by the author or the current copyright holder. That is the sharing I'm talking about.

What if it was a song like, say, "Desperado" and you were too poor to buy a copy to give to some young guy like, say, Aaron Schwartz about to do something really alienated and foolish? :-( Thankfully there are still other options:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...
"And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone
[other great parts omitted out of copyright fears]"

It is really a very odd idea though, when you think about it, that some initial distributor of the song (let alone a government-funded research paper) gets to prevent you from copying, modifying, and/or redistributing a pattern of bits stored on hardware in your possession. It seems very undemocratic as it opens up the possibility that on the flimsiest of evidence anyone who claims any sort of copyright on anything can demand an inspection of the contents of any data storage to make sure a crime has not been committed?

In ancient times, someone inspired to write a song might have been seen to have received a transmission from some godly muse. From that perspective, by what right can such a person enter into a contract to restrict the redistribution of that muse's work? Isn't such a restriction imposed by the government an interference with the divine as well as with charitable human society?

I'm not saying I necessarily see it that way myself, but it's an example of how there are all sorts of ways to look at these things. The way that is dominant in the current legal system is the result of past political struggles and is not the only perspective. As is mentioned here:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"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."

Another perspective:
http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs...
"In India, where monopolisation is mostly frowned upon especially with the respect to creative aspects, Creative Commons seems like a fitting option to be adopted."

Or further:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""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?""

Rather than copyright, why not a basic income that ensures artists (individually and collectively) creative freedom and the time to use it? Then we catch two birds with one net (funding creativity and dealing with job loss from automation).

"A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?"

It doesn't matter much in a wealthy post-scarcity society because there is already so much abundance to go around. If someone is good at, say, "drawing vultures", why should anyone really care if there is little "demand" for that skill -- assuming everyone can still get all the food they want from automated farms powered by fusion power plants and delivered by a local package delivery system? You also never know when a skill might prove useful in the future -- like making an entertaining smartphone app called "Angry Vultures? :-)

Frankly, what most PhD students produce in their dissertation is, by their own admission generally, of little interest to the general public, and even rarely of interest to more than a handful of other specialists. Assuming we can "afford" it, why should people not be able to get a PhD in what they want to study? When you look at the lives of the children of the wealthy, who often can afford to write books, or get PhDs, or work at non-profits, or be involved in the low-paying performing arts and so on, that is what we often see in practice.

In VFY, Hogan suggests that "competence" can be valued irrespective of what it is in. A character connects that to the early days of the post-scarcity society's founding, when the first children (produced from DNA by a space probe landing on a new planet, creating a cultural break from the past) were raised by robots who would provide them with whatever they wanted; the only way to compete for status among peers and to stand out by learning to do something well, whatever it was. As long as people aren't actively bothering other people, they would tend to be allowed by their peers to do what they want. If people are actively harming others, then there will be conflicts, which are resolved in a variety of ways (including, in the end, violence). Hogan goes into that in some detail in the book, and one does not have to agree with every aspect of what he envisioned to see that alternatives could be possible.

Hogan's idea is just a fictional example; no doubt reality would be more complex. People can legitimately disagree on assessments of risks and rewards and also on social forms and ways to resolve conflicts. And there are no doubt human qualities of "values" that transcend competence. One can easily find examples of people doing despicable things "competently", such as rounding up Japanese-Americans and putting them in internment camps in the USA during WWII. Or what would it mean to be a highly competent "waterboarder" (even when history shows torture pretty much never provides useful intelligence overall compared to humane treatment of captives)? So in practice, yes, one should consider both means and ends in evaluating behavior. As the Navaho, paraphrasing I hope correctly, if it is done in the right spirit, it is more important than if it is done well.

Competence might also be in picking the right problem to solve -- like where a fumbler doing something in a half-assed way might still have been working on the most important issue and create enough of a solution to help everyone? Being a parent is an important calling, but there are no "perfect" parents, just good ones usually muddling through as best they can (even when financially wealthy) -- and it is hard to put a value on parenting the next generation, which is in some ways both the most important task of a civilization while also usually having negative economic value for decades. There is also a lot to be said for diversity, as in: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." It can in practice be hard to appreciate competence in some area you are not familiar with. And often the greatest artistry is in making things look simple, or even helping others to learn complex skills easily, or re-engineering things so they are easy to do or learn.

Hogan's "Chironian" civilization is the creation of an imaginative electrical/computer engineer who had worked for DEC and wrote hard sci-fi, and no doubt the book has some biases in what one might expect are related engineering values like "competence". Things like artistry or conviviality might be harder things to evaluate objectively -- although Hogan's Irish roots show in his fond descriptions of bars and bartenders, so I don't want to imply he did not value those good at creating conviviality.

For more alternative economics ideas beyond Hogan, see:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Dict...
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."

See: "Fresh Start For the Left: What Activists Would Do If They Took the Social Sciences Seriously" http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
"Convincing leftists to adopt a combined electoral/social movement strategy that abandons third parties and the possible use of property destruction or other forms of physical attack would be a difficult task. Right now there are few leftists who are not for one or another of these self-defeating approaches.
    But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work. Economics, sociology, and political science establish this point in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it is still too difficult if not impossible to collect all the information, and make the fast adjustments to changing preferences, that would be needed for central planning in a complex economy, no matter how community-based it was at its starting point. In addition, no one has yet devised methods for analyzing the inadequate information that can be gathered. Then there are all the problems of keeping a bureaucracy responsive, even one that held frequent meetings with neighborhood councils and work-site employee councils, as still nicely summarized in the old phrase, "who says organization says oligarchy."
    The impossibility of centralized, non-market planning, even within a democratic society, I am asserting, means that it is necessary to abandon the economic plan that has been seen as the solution by most egalitarians for the past 150 years. It's the "s" word, socialism. Because no one mentions socialism any more, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with China taking the capitalist road, in the form of "Market-Leninism," it's hard to know just how many leftists still think socialism would work in a fully developed democratic economy. But it's my guess that many still hold out some hope, if only because there seems to be no other alternative. The problem is embodied in the label that many leftists now have adopted for themselves, "anti-capitalists." But what does "anti-capitalist" mean?
    Many leftists will be skeptical, but a highly plausible new direction for bringing about greater economic equality and more access to common property is offered by planning through the market. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets.
    There is thus no need for one big centralized planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets. In the past, egalitarians could not think of these interventions as planning tools for two reasons. First, they are currently used by the corporations that dominate the government for their own short-run interests. Second, most egalitarians couldn't see the possibilities for any kind of decentralized market-based planning because they thought of planning as central planning.
      According to this way of thinking about planning, then, the big issue is winning political power from the corporate-conservative coalition, which is another reason why challenges in the electoral arena are such an important dimension of a full-scale egalitarian movement within a democratic society. That is, taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulations could be used by egalitarians to do planning through the market if they had enough power in the government. The economic issues are not all that arcane. The solutions are there. But the political power has been sorely lacking. ..."

As the Triple Revolution Memorandum suggested in 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocra...
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
    The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
    There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.
    Recent administrations have proposed measures aimed at achieving a better distribution of resources, and at reducing unemployment and underemployment. A few of these proposals have been enacted. More often they have failed to secure congressional support. In every case, many members of Congress have criticized the proposed measures as departing from traditional principles for the allocation of resources and the encouragement of production. Abetted by budget-balancing economists and interest groups they have argued for the maintenance of an economic machine based on ideas of scarcity to deal with the facts of abundance produced by cybernation. This time-consuming criticism has slowed the workings of Congress and has thrown out of focus for that body the inter-related effects of the triple revolution.
    An adequate distribution of the potential abundance of goods and services will be achieved only when it is understood that the major economic problem is not how to increase production but how to distribute the abundance that is the great potential of cybernation. There is an urgent need for a fundamental change in the mechanisms employed to insure consumer rights."

A basic income would ensure that every citizen had some money to use to "vote" to meet his or her own needs economically. It would help ensure one of Franklin D. Roosevelt 's "Four Freedoms" of "Freedom from Want". Otherwise, letting all dollars pile up in a few hands is like trying to run a Kanban factory control system by letting all the tokens pile up in one part of the factory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

However, while In general I agree with Domhoff's analysis above as far as it goes, I feel it is incomplete because it leaves out other possibilities.

Expanding the gift economy could help, where signals are sent as requests for gifts or just by people observing needs in their communities. The free software movement, especially GNU/BSD/etc/Linux, is an example of this sort of "economy" where signals are often sent in ways not involving money changing hands.

Increased subsistence production like via solar panels or 3D printing could help (if they become cheaper and better). In that case signals are conveyed by thoughts or discussions within a household as the people use what they have to provide for themselves. This is like an old style 90% subsistence farm, but with modern technology including personal robotics and perhaps someday "Diamond Age" nanotech and hot or cold fusion.

Government planning at all levels might in theory be greatly improved by new forms of social software on the internet. The last is something yet to really emerge with several "open government" initiatives just beginning. Systemd aside, Debian is at least one big example of internet mediated governance of a complex project). In the case of Debian, signals include emails, IRC messages, and git pull requests.
http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...

So, I feel in the long term we will see a mix of all those approaches, in the same way we have a mix of them all now -- just with less and less emphasis over time on the exchange economy, especially the income-through-wages part. There are multiple ways to send signals, and you are right to point out how often planned systems can fail to receive or heed them. However, commercial free market systems can fail in that way too, by ignoring systemic risks and externalities and various other issues, like Greenspan said:
"Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Thanks for the clarification! :-)

Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In the 1960s or so, in the USA the Democratic party became aligned with labor on "protecting" jobs. Labor unions created essentially private welfare states withing big companies and Democrats helped with that. These are private welfare states because the benefits (like health insurance and good wages) just apply to workers in the specific companies. Implicit in all that was a bias against automation in order to "save jobs" (and also force up minimum wages) because it was generally worse for people to be unemployed and poor instead of working in a reasonably well-run factory making cars of whatever. It was the Republicans who earned a reputation for supporting industrial progress and automation and change. That is ironic, because Democrats are often thought of as progressive, and Republicans as conservative -- but not when it comes to automation. The unions of old have been fading away as the private welfare states withing big companies collapse from their own economics like with GM burdened by retiree pensions and health care costs, with union rates dropping from around 30% to 10% over that time (round numbers from memory). Any move to further increase worker benefits or raise the minimum wage just speeds the economic death spiral towards full automation for most jobs. I can wonder what things be like today if instead of supporting private welfare states for corporate workers, the Democrats in the 1960s has championed increasing automation and a tax-funded basic income to go with it, leaving Republicans to somehow fight against industrialization and modernism in business as they tend to fight change on social issues? Still you could argue Republicans are fighting for retaining a older version of freewheeling business, ignoring the socioeconomic implication of automation?

The dynamics of all this are also complex because personally owned automation like a personal computer or 3D printer or smartphone can (in theory) empower an individual in a way that the large scale corporately-owned automation in a huge steel plant or huge automotive plant did not. If there is a chance the current directions to economic deregulation pushed by Republicans (and even Democrats now) will end well, it would probably be because of that. Kevin Carson writes about that difference.
http://c4ss.org/content/author...
http://www.anarkismo.net/artic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"Intrinsic motivation has been studied since the early 1970s. Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire to seek out new things and new challenges, to analyze one's capacity, to observe and to gain knowledge.[5] It is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on external pressures or a desire for reward."

One of the biggest problems most financially successful artists have is that their buying public wants more of the same (say, another Harry Potter novel), whereas their artistic muse may want to move in new directions. That's a reason many commercially successful artists tend to stagnate artistically since doing more of the same is much less risky financially but is often unsatisfying artistically.

It was just that in James P. Hogan's post-scarcity society you generally acquired status through demonstrating competence in some way (could be anything, even being a good waiter or running some interesting attraction like a steam locomotive), not by acquiring material wealth. Skill in *producing* or repairing high quality goods would be respected, not generally the skill in *acquiring* such goods, especially since most material things were freely available for the taking as they could be mass produced by robots as copies as desired. Even for original works of art, it was the creator of the work who would get the status, not the ultimate possessor of the artwork (who in a way became indebted to the artwork's creator by acknowledging the competency of the creator). There is a section of the book where with some hand waving it is suggested that if you grow up in such a society you just know the rules almost instinctively and also can spot a pretender at competence the way a shopkeeper in today's society could spot a counterfeit hundred dollar bill. Projects there self-organized on the basis of individuals deferring to each other based on specific competences -- not sure what the would have made of the recent "systemd" controversy? :-)

So, projecting that idea into the Star Trek universe, it might be that overall most "red shirts" are just in some sense less competent than someone who had worked his way up, like Kirk or Picard? So, no wonder they are getting killed so easily, if they don't have the competencies the blue shirt characters have? :-) All that said, Worf demonstrated that "red shirt" security on the Enterprise could be highly competent and respected -- although, come to think of it, I'm not sure what color his uniform was? Gold? Anyway, it is all fiction of course. Just something to think about. Iain Banks had his own take on all that with the Culture series as well.

In general, US society has trouble with the idea that status could come from competence and gift giving as opposed to acquiring and hoarding wealth. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States,[1] among whom it is traditionally the primary economic system.[2] ... Typically the potlatch was practiced more in the winter seasons as historically the warmer months were for procuring wealth for the family, clan, or village, then coming home and sharing that with neighbors and friends. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[16] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to 'civilized values' of accumulation.[17] The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized".[18] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice."

An example of a modern day laws banning gift giving:
"90-Year-Old Man Charged With Feeding Homeless Says He Won't 'Give Up' "
http://abcnews.go.com/US/90-ye...
"The Fort Lauderdale Police told ABC News that Abbott will get his court subpoena in the mail and a judge will decide whether he will spend up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. "Arnold thinks he can feed wherever he wants and the laws say differently. Despite the fact that he's a super nice guy and he's a gentleman and a kind soul we have to enforce the law," Seiler said. Although Abbott has been cited twice in less than a week, he has no plans to stop feeding the homeless, telling ABC News over the phone from his non-profit organization, Love Thy Neighbor, that the only alternative he has is to go to court."

And, in general:
"More Cities Are Making It Illegal To Hand Out Food To The Homeless"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...
"If you don't have a place to live, getting enough to eat clearly may be a struggle. And since homelessness in the U.S. isn't going away and is even rising in some cities, more charitable groups and individuals have been stepping up the past few years to share food with these vulnerable folks in their communities. But just as more people reach out to help, cities are biting back at those hands feeding the homeless. According to Michael Stoops, a supporter named Tem Feavel submitted this image to the National Coalition for the Homeless in 2007, but there is no record of where it was taken. According to Michael Stoops, a supporter named Tem Feavel submitted this image to the National Coalition for the Homeless in 2007, but there is no record of where it was taken. According to a report released Monday by the National Coalition for the Homeless, 21 cities have passed measures aimed at restricting the people who feed the homeless since January 2013. In that same time, similar legislation was introduced in more than 10 cities. Combined, these measures represent a 47 percent increase in the number of cities that have passed or introduced legislation to restrict food sharing since the coalition last counted in 2010."

If more people lose jobs to robots, will we see more laws against gift giving to try to preserve some notion of the status quo and hide the social problem away?

Copyright laws are also laws against sharing. They may have some political justifications (debatable), but as Richard Stallman points out, sharing is the basis of human civilization. And others like James Boyle have pointed out that building on the works of others is also fundamental to civilization, which copyright also makes more difficult.

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. ...
    Yet scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between means and ends. We should entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in business for their health, a finite objective, and that bow and arrow are adequate to that end. ...
    A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. ..."

I really liked Anonanonaon's post above!!!
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Thanks, meta-monkey! Glad someone else thinks it could be fun. :-) While I don't have time to do much on it at the moment, I'd suggest building tire factory simulations that can be used in a web browser is a step forward. After that, who knows?

== Some more rambles on the idea and its implications

Here is a bit of what is involved in making tires:
"How tires are made "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Michelin tyre manufacturing process"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It looks like each tire is made one at a time, with a lot of labor? And some danger to the worker with spinning wheels and cutting tools and so on. Not sure if all plants are still like that. It might explain why tires can be inconsistent. Safety can drives automaton because automation can generally assure higher quality (not always). Just looking at a guy cutting something by eye which is going to form a seem makes me wonder how often tires are a bit lopsided? No wonder they need balancing...

Costs for products generally drop when people can figure out how to get them produced in a continuous printing-like process such as big newspapers use (solar cells will probably soon be going that way). Often is is cheaper to re-engineer a product to be "printed" than to automate a more complex process. For example, if the tire material was produced by first creating a big sheet, and there was some way to the material could then be formed into shape at the end. Or if there was some new material that would phase change (maybe under radiation?) from liquid to solid and be super strong, then the process could be simplified by removing the need for the steel wires. But that all takes on quickly into research projects -- which have their own fun, but are different from just automating the current process. But no doubt there are people in graduate programs in material science and manufacturing engineering (probably getting subsistence wages there for years) who would love to research that kind of stuff.

Maybe the closest model to this right now is the Linux Kernel or, more broadly, a GNU/Linux distribution like Debian? There are a variety of interest parties involved with something like that. I theory, any Linux user would contribute, but in practice you need to go up a long learnign curve, and so few people do contribute, but some few do. Although by now most of the core Kernel developers are supported by companies that sell related products or services (like RedHat or most lately Samsung).
http://news.slashdot.org/story...

In the case of tires, who would tangentially benefit from a a great tire factory? In theory, perhaps makers of automobiles, professors of material science, people at places like the US DOT or NIST and similar might all get involved in setting up and running such a plant as something tangential to their other work?

The biggest issue in our current society would be getting the capital together to do that. However, in the short term, we could make a simulation of the factory in some framework.

A couple examples:
"Minecraft 100% Automatic Bread Factory (sounds like by a kid)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Minecraft cake factory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Cake factory v2, Fully automatic!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Minecraft probably isn't the right framework for realistic simulations. The electrical engineering in Mniecraft would be fairly limited even with mods for improvements over redstone. However, these videos show that people can actually build factories just for fun. They even may build multiple versions of the factories, learning as they go.

Today, building physical factories is obviously harder than building Minecraft ones. But, as we get better robotics technologies, the gap between designing something from modules and seeing it constructed is going to shrink, in the same way 3D printing is shrinking that distance for individual small parts.

I guess the first thing we need (from a software developers point of view) is a good FOSS tool for simulating factories... I worked on some software to do that on a Symbolics in ZetaLisp about 27 years ago, and even then there were various vendors selling packaged solutions (mostly to understand physical layout and materials flow). I don't know what is available now. If I was going to write something from scratch, I'd focus on a 2D model of material flows, with the thought things could move to 3D later. Individual processes like rolling things on a drum could be done in 3D. I'd also model the human part of things, sicne we are talkign about it -- with some sort of notion of motivation based on (Dan Pink's theory) of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. I'd probably write it in JavaScript, just because I'm working in JavaScript now and then anyone could play with the simulation in a web browser, including perhaps gamify it somehow -- "Angry Tirebots?" :-) I know C or C++ is obviously a more typical language for vision algorithms, and of course I'm not a big JavaScript fan even if I use it for easy deployment. Stuff could be written in C and compiled to JavaScript of course using Emscripten even if the target environment (at first) was a web browser to make the project approachable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

A quick search on software related to simulation shows about 400 packages, so there is a lot to learn about or from or use:
http://sourceforge.net/directo...

BTW, I just searched on "automated tire manufacturing" and got this as the first result (might be more, Siemens is next in the list):
http://www.cimcorp.com/Dream_F...
"Total material flow control with comprehensive tire data tracking. With our Dream Factory solution, we offer comprehensive automation technology for tire manufacturers, providing total control of the material flow and precise, real-time data for production and inventory management. By automating material handling throughout the factory, Cimcorp's systems optimize throughput, minimize buffer stocks and make dynamic use of available space. Computer control of all automation units means that individual tires can be tracked through the whole process. With Dream factory, we can ensure that you achieve the maximum possible throughput of high-qualilty tires. Cimcorp has supplied a significant number of greenfield and brownfield installations for tire manufacturers worldwide. Although a greenfield site offers the ideal platform for Dream Factory, the fact that this system is created from independent modules means that partial automation of existing facilities is also simple to implement. We have solutions for raw material and component processing, green tire processing, curing, testing, palletizing, warehousing and shipping."

One page there:
http://www.cimcorp.com/Space-e...
"As part of our Dream Factory solution, we have developed several fully automated systems for green tire processing: robots for unloading of the tire-building machines, transfer robots and intelligent AGVs for transportation of tires from the building machines to the spraying area, and gantry robots for green tire buffer storage. Our solutions also take care of the weighing and spraying processes, as well as related inspection functions."

And elsewhere on that site: "Cimcorp's material handling solution begins in the raw material and component processing area, where our WCS control system with gantry robots, ASRS or intelligent AGVs can take care of the handling requirements."

And for a sense of the scope of the industry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Pneumatic tires are manufactured according to relatively standardized processes and machinery, in around 455 tire factories in the world. With over 1 billion tires manufactured worldwide annually, the tire industry is the major consumer of natural rubber."

However, twenty years ago, most software was produced in proprietary "factories" and we have seen a big shift. Why not tires? (Incidentally, for any jobs lost, I'd advocate for a basic income as a political shift, so I do not have a big issue with automating jobs, even if automation does shift the balance of power in a society.)

So, were we to move forward on this, we end up in the same situation as Linux was in the mid-1990s. There are already companies selling proprietary solutions in this area. So its a bit of an uphill climb there to really get adoption and broad support. And whatever solutions we developed would likely be first resisted by these players, until eventually they might incorporate them in their own ways into their own facilities. And systems like vision recognition software for, say, inspecting something being formed on a rotating drum might then get reused in a variety of applications.

However, obviously a quicker way to get in on the tire action would probably be to just work fro someplace like Cimcorp. They seem to be based in Finland? Or perhaps Siemens or a similar company. But, as in the 1990s, likely then almost everything you are doing is proprietary and you have likely more limits on creative freedom. Still, patents make information public (in theory) and anything an engineer invents or learns in one setting can, in theory, be applied in other places (within the bounds of law). And many open source projects fail despite creative hardworking people because different creative visions end up not meshing well -- or, more often, the realities of needing to earn an income within the current economic system intrude.

I'm currently working on another software project (implementing a software system related to my wife's free book Working with Stories), so alas, I don't have much cycles to put into this at the moment. And in a few months, I'm probably going to get a full time job doing unrelated stuff for pay again, and with a family that would preclude taking on too much on the side. But this issue of simulation remains of interest to me, an interest going back decades:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...

Ideas from 2002 from a project I started back then but which falters after I had a kid. The links from back then to software probably have mostly rotted:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/pro...
http://lists.nongnu.org/archiv...
http://lists.nongnu.org/archiv...

For me, and for the short term, I know raising capital to build an actual plant or even just a lab filled with a couple robots and tire-making paraphernalia would be very hard. It would be even harder to make the venture work given today's exchange economy.

But, taking a step back, and looking this as a simulation project, making simulation tools, or at least learning to use simulation tools, the whole thing is at least approachable. And then tire manufacturing would be a test case driving the improvement of the simulation tools.

One might think that maybe a company like Goodyear might somehow fund such work to have its name benefit from advertising? Or if that was too controversial though, one might think a car company (GM? Or maybe Tesla?) could help support such work?

Income in today's exchange economy for a typical "Creative" profession like engineering is in many ways not about "rewarding" a person so much as it is about "enabling" that person to spend time thinking about a problem. Fellowships in academia can serve much the same purpose (even if they may have a reward aspect based on, in theory, selection for merit based on past performance or promise from lots of applicants). Related:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In the case of your interest in electrical engineering, the question then is what kind of simulations would you need to work on this in a fun way? What kind do you use now to design and (virtually) test circuits?

Granted, simulations are not the same as reality. And realistically, this all may never happen, at least not involving you or me, for all sorts of reasons. Still, I hope I've presented at least a plausible case that a lot of people might be willing to work on such things without "reward" in an economic sense -- as long as we distinguish getting enough income to have a US middle class life while working on fun engineering projects from "reward". In a "Star Trek" society that would be the case, with essentially a basic income for everyone ("replicator rations" on Star Trek Voyager?). In the USA and some other countries right now, it is also the case for people over 65 on Social Security or who are retired on a pension or, to some extent, for people in school (like Linus Torvalds when he wrote Linux). Although such people tend to have either little energy (retired) or little experience (school). Still, in that sense, anyone over the age of 65 in the USA is already living in the beginnings of a Star Trek economy and a basic income, even if they do so using the Amazon "matter replicator" with two-day delays. :-) It is, of course, also true for millionaires -- of which there are several million such families in the USA. It would only take maybe a dozen people moving beyond the exchange-focused ideology behind such successes to have enough talent as a group to make amazing free simulations.

Bill Gates was born into a millionaire family, but instead he chose to go the proprietary/exchange route rather than use his inheritance write free software to help free other people. he even lectured people on why software could not be free based on the (false) implication he needed to earn money to write it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
"In the letter, Gates expressed frustration with most computer hobbyists who were using his company's Altair BASIC software without having paid for it. He asserted that such widespread unauthorized copying in effect discourages developers from investing time and money in creating high-quality software."

The world might be a very different place today if Bill Gates had used that inherited money and the computer knowledge gained from dumpster diving differently.

"How to be as rich as Bill Gates"
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "

And Paul Allen remembers the early years:
http://patch.com/california/lo...
"That phase of Allen's life involved taking the bus-sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all -- down to the offices of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen.""

Thankfully, there have been many people like Linus Torvalds, Brewster Kahle, Richard Stallman, and Michael S. Hart who made a different choice, and our world is that much richer for it. So someday, we may have free tires to go with out free electric cars. :-) Comments by me on "free" electric cars:
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"Real world attempts towards free-to-the-user electric cars"
https://groups.google.com/foru...

One import thing to remember about a post-scarcity society is that, because technology is an amplifier, it only (in theory) takes a very few dedicated people to produce a huge output of material goods if the factories are highly automated. Just like it only takes a (relatively) few people working on the Linux Kernel to make software that powers literally billions of machines at this point (from smartphones to Google's servers to embedded computers in automobiles).
"Will your next car run Linux? Cars go open-source with Automotive Grade Linux"
http://www.techradar.com/us/ne...

Anyway, the potential is there, even if it might take another couple decades to realize it (including probably a vast social upheaval in assumptions, including from the issue in the original article as most workers lose their job to AI and robotics and other automation and better design and cheap energy and so on). Anyone writing or even using free software (including anyone using Google) is in some sense part of that movement, as is anyone freely sharing knowledge through the internet in a variety of social media platforms -- including Slashdot.

Anyway, back to work on finishing software I've been working on for months for my wife's project and for which we may well never see a dime in *direct* return... But it is something we hope will make the world a better place, like our PlantStudio and other free software (hopefully) did... And so the *indirect* benefits can be enormous.

It's a big a paradigm shift to a gift economy (or improved subsistence), sure. As an example of it, if you really thought you needed "open heart surgery", here is a gift to keep you away from going under the surgeon's knife or robot: :-)
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.

There, I just saved you US$100K and a lot of suffering. Please pay it forward if you can and want to. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Trevor's plan is a charitable program based on the networking of good deeds. He calls his plan "Pay It Forward", which means the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others rather than paying the favor back. However, it needs to be a major favor that the receiver can't complete themselves."

Sadly, I sat next to someone at an automotive shop yesterday who had just spend three days getting the software to work right for such cardiology intervention tools for a local hospital. And I could not bring myself to point that out, not thinking of a polite way to say it. I did obliquely say how various forms of blood testing for nutritional deficiency like vitamin A or vitamin D was a breakthrough, as was various forms of diagnostic imaging. It's a hard conversation to have, about how much of what we spend so much money and suffering on is needless and even harmful.

My father died of a heart attack about half a year after getting a stent put in. A sister died about a year after open heart surgery. Neither procedure addressed the underlying nutritional issues leading to clogged arteries which also affect arteries everywhere like the brain and which also impair the immune system.

Of course, you might say, so OK, cardiology is a scam, but you needed new tires which why you were in the automotive shop and paid about $1000 yesterday. And that is true. But my neighbor had come over before that with an impact wrench to help me get some lug nuts free to get a spare on (a longer story), and my wife used the internet to look at tire reviews on public forums (ended up with Goodyear Assurance TripleTred instead of Nokain WR G3 based on availability, but Goodyear got surprisingly good reviews). And the tire shop people went out of their way to get the tires given I was driving on a donut because we noticed the flat last night, whereas that probably did not affect their own lives that much overall. I previously watched several videos on tire repair which was helpful background. So even the physical exchange economy has a mix of gift transactions built into it.

In the shop I watched an NBC-SN on people restoring classic cards and also building a low cost sport truck -- things most people do more for fun than money.

Tesla may change the whole car repair paradigm back to independent shops and DIY because many aspects of their repair are more approachable, as another Slashdot article from today suggests.

Still, I don't plan on making my own car tires anytime soon. :-) However, my wife and I have managed to get by with only one car for more than two decades, and we don't drive that much. So, in various ways, we've at least cut that problem mostly in half including through being able to consult or work mostly remotely via the internet. So, we've replaced half our tires with broadband. :-) Again though, I'm not making my own ICs. But, I rely continually on the mostly gift economy aspect of the internet (including slashdot) to keep out network and PCs running.

Are we there yet to some sort of post-scarcity economy? No. But we may be a lot closer than most people think -- even if the transition may be much more painful than it has to be (for reasons JP Hogan explored in Voyage From Yesteryear). A basic income (social security for all from birth, not just for old people) might get us there more quickly and painlessly.

Money is indeed a useful signaling device for demand if it is distributed more broadly rather than letting get piled up in a few places. But imagine how long the internet would function if you could only send a packet if you had previously received one, or you otherwise had to take out packet loans based on your packet creditworthiness... We need to carefully distinguish between true scarcity and artificial scarcity.

As for tires, while I might not be that into building one myself from goo, as a software developer, I think it would be a fun challenge to write software to manage a mostly automated factory that makes tires (and ideally recycles them). Vision systems for inspection, software to integrate chemical monitoring and temperature readings into pretty informative displays, fancy tech to ensure zero emissions into the environment, safety interlocks (stressful but challenging) -- a post-scarcity tire factory could be a programmer's playground. :-) I could imagine such a tire factory that I would love going to a few hours every day (perhaps virtually) and hanging out with other techies and having great fun while making sure high quality tires kept flowing. And I'd be proud to know I was helping keep millions of people safe by making great tires. Although in practice, I'd expect most tire factories are likely not quite that *yet* given unaccounted externalties like pollution and using overworked frightened-of-poverty-from-unemployment wage slaves instead of robots. But tire factories could be in theory be such places if the rest of the economy was also such a place. And maybe someday they will be if our broader economy changes. Related, just over three stars out of five for Goodyear employment reviews:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie...

Thanks for reading my rant! :-)

Enjoyed skimming through it, especially the point about character encoding and the value of utf-8. Many arguments for name restrictions are because it would make shell commands and scripts easier to write correctly. That suggests to me the bigger issue is the shell.

As the computer language Forth shows, there does not have to be an obvious line between a programming language and a command line. It's unfortunate our systems generally have multiple languages with different conventions. What might be better is a good language with levels of parsing, sort of like the difference between JSON and JavaScript, or HTML/CSS and JavaScript, where some levels are not intended to have executable code and the system knows that. Anyway, just a seed of an idea.

Just to try to grow it a bit, imagine if (shudder, as I prefer Smalltalk syntax) we used JavaScript as a "shell" syntax. When you wanted to delete a file, you might enter:

        $ File.remove(["force"], "file name with spaces or not");

instead of:

        $ rm -f file\ name\ with\ spaces\ or\ not

Actually, I prefer the JavaScript version. :-)

Because JavaScript is so flexible, you could do in some JavaScript shell profile:

      var rm = File.remove;
      var rmf = rm.bind(["force"]);

Then, with assumed semicolons you could write:

      $ rmf("file name with spaces or not")

That seems much clearer to me than the conventional shell script notation.

Commands could return JavaScript objects for results, displayed as JSON. So:

        $ File.list()

        {"test1.js", "test2.js"}

        $ File.list(["long"])

        {".": ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", 2822, "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
        "..": ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", 2822, "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
        "test1.js", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
        "test2.js", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
        "-rf", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
        "metacharacter & ||||| weirdness!!!! | rm -rf /*", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"]}

        $ rm("metacharacter & ||||| weirdness!!!! | rm -rf /*")
        $ rm("-rf")

I'm not sure if there would be other stiff like pipes that might trip you up, especially with JavaScript's syntax and single-tasking assumptions. Probably the results of these functions might have to be some form of Deferreds or something like that?

As a first cut at pipes, assuming the result of a previous operation as a JavaScript object is passed as a final argument to the next operation:

        $ File.list().then(File.grep.bind("test*")).then(File.write.bind("out.txt"))

Or with appropriate aliases via var and an assumption that "then" does a bind for arguments:

        $ ls().then(grep, "test*").then(write, "out.txt")

Seems much easier to me to really understand this. It's a tradeoff of course. You might be typing a few more characters sometimes than for something like Bash, but whenever you tried to do something complex, it might be more understandable than a mess of metacharacters. And then file names (in ut8) without restrictions on metacharacters would not be such a big issue. These functions could even have a case-insensitive option.

with a IMHO human-friendly syntax like one derived from Smalltalk, where you used spaces to separate messages instead of a dot ("."), you would have:

      $ (File ls) then: [File grep: "test*"] then: [File write "out.txt"]

Maybe there could be some variant of JavaScript someday that supports an implict "." where spaces are used between tokens and the expression is not otherwise properly formed? Then you could write:

        $ ls() then(grep, "test*") then(write, "out.txt")

Compare that with Bash of:

        $ ls | grep test > out.txt

But if we tinker with Our JavaScript a bit, adding a new word for redirecting output, we might get down to:

      $ ls() then(grep, "test*") save("out.txt")

However, likely grep might not work as well as we might want, as there might be a mismatch between JavaScript objects or JSON versus line-oriented Grep. So, no doubt there would need to be tinkering with commands like grep and what the expect, and options for what other commands can output, perhaps emitting any of objects, arrays, strings with line breaks, and/or JSON. And choosing those options might add clutter.

Of course, as I was writing this, I started thinking that someone must have done this before, but I waited until now to check, Sure enough:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/...
http://documentup.com/arturadi...
"ShellJS is a portable (Windows/Linux/OS X) implementation of Unix shell commands on top of the Node.js API. You can use it to eliminate your shell script's dependency on Unix while still keeping its familiar and powerful commands. You can also install it globally so you can run it from outside Node projects - say goodbye to those gnarly Bash scripts!"

Although, I don't know how they handle pipes and whether they do Deferreds or something like that. Possibly not from this example from the webpage:

    ls('*.js').forEach(function(file) {
        sed('-i', 'BUILD_VERSION', 'v0.1.2', file);
        sed('-i', /.*REMOVE_THIS_LINE.*\n/, '', file);
        sed('-i', /.*REPLACE_LINE_WITH_MACRO.*\n/, cat('macro.js'), file);
    });

However, they have a CoffeeScript variant which shows (the hope) that maybe one could have a variant that did not require adding the dots (.) between function calls:

    for file in ls '*.js'
        sed '-i', 'BUILD_VERSION', 'v0.1.2', file
        sed '-i', /.*REMOVE_THIS_LINE.*\n/, '', file
        sed '-i', /.*REPLACE_LINE_WITH_MACRO.*\n/, cat 'macro.js', file

Of course, I use vi a lot for editing config files despite disliking it because it is installed everywhere. So, something like ShellJS faces an uphill battle in that sense. Still, who knows what will be the next exciting thing in system administration? The issue of security might drive the adoption of some new standard for shell commands and shell scripts.

But, in any case, there is an assumption in the essay you linked to that a typical Bash-like shell or similar is how many file names are going to be referenced. If we use a different shell, the issue of "metacharacter" or even spaces in file names may just go away. Still, overall, that essay was a great read, and I hope to review it further:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays...