Even with today's technology all 7.5 billion of us could live like kings and queens. It is pure pure greed and arrogance that prevents it.

Quite possibly... but why do you think better technology will change that situation? If anything, wouldn't it only make matters worse?

With machines doing the work, the free abundance is even more obvious.

With machines doing the work, there will be fewer jobs available for human beings, which in and of itself is not a problem except for this annoying fact that people need money to live.

"Oh, but we can replace our capitalistic system with a socialized one", you might say... except the reality of a socialized system that can take care of people who are not able to work requires a majority of the population to be paying taxes, which requires that they are earning an income. in a situation where most people cannot find work at all because all of their jobs have been replaced by increasingly intelligent machines, any attempt at a social welfare system to support them would collapse almost immediately.

Back in the early 90s I had the opportunity of participating on a paleontological expedition to the badlands of Montana. The soil was built up over hundreds of millions of years and flooding cut through the soft soil leaving a stratigraphy that is dramatic and easy to read. You can even see the Chicxulub ejecta, a chocolate brown horizontal line about the width of your hand.

Now whole dinosaur skeletons are a rare find. You can spend a whole season tramping through the badlands and never find two bones that go together. But individual bones are more common, and bone fragments are more common still, and experts can often identify the group of dinosaurs or even the species of dinosaur a bone fragment came from, often a surprisingly small fragment of bone.

What we were doing was assembling a database of species found by layer, which in turn maps to era. What the PI was finding was a shift towards species with anatomical adaptations to deal with heat. His opinion was that there was already a climate driven adaptive stress on the dinosaur population, which turned the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact into a knock-out blow.

So the idea that there was more going on than an asteroid impact is hardly new. People were thinking that way twenty years ago.

I was out mowing the lawn at my parents' place one day on a Wednesday afternoon in late July of that year, and the strangest thing happened to me that I had absolutely no explanation for at the time. I cannot describe the sensation any other way than to say that I was suddenly afraid of the sky. The weather seemed entirely fine by all appearances, with only a smattering of clouds in the sky, but all I wanted to do was just abandon the lawn mower right where it was and get inside. Of course, intellectually I knew it was absurd to be afraid of the sky, and I pushed aside the feelings and finished my task, but it was still the strangest sensation I think I had ever felt, and if mowing the lawn had required more concentration, I probably would not have been able to finish it on account of being so distracted

Some 48 hours later or so, the largest tornado that had ever been seen in that area until that time ripped through the city, killing more than 2 dozen people, destroying several hundred homes, and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. I remember when I was taking the bus the next day to where I worked at the time, I went by one of the areas where the tornado had touched down and the devastation was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life prior to that point.

I often wondered since that event, however, if what I was interpreting as being "afraid of the sky" only a couple of days before was some sort of survival instinct that was trying to kick in... to get me out of harms way, even though I did not know exactly what that harm was. Certainly it would be no surprise to me at all if many animals might happen to possess something similar, and lacking the intellectual reasoning of a human who could discard such a sensation on a rational basis, as I did at the time, would instead surrender their actions to doing whatever those feelings are telling them to do, and get the bloody hell out of the area.

One thing every thoughtful fan of the mystery story knows is that in real life, motivation tells you very little about who done what. That's because *most* people, when faced with a problem, don't even consider murder. Murderers are not typical people.

The same goes for hackers. When companies first started putting Internet connections back in the 90s in I would explain that they need to start taking steps to secure their networks, and almost without exception the response was "Why? Why would anyone be interested in hacking *us*?" And I had to explain that the Internet was accessible to *everyone*, including people whose motivations and ways of thinking would make no sense to them.

Motivation may have limited use in perhaps identifying some possible suspects, but it's not probative of anything. You can't rule anyone out or in based on what you think their motivations are or should be. The only way to know that somebody has done something is by following the chain of evidence that leads to some concrete action they've taken.

I'd like this, stories like it, to be discussed on Slashdot.

A long time ago, Pascal was a popular language. In 2 years it was dead. How do we avoid wasting time with technology that won't last?

I think what people are scared of is the their precious capitalism will become obsolete

I believe it's a little more fundamental than that.... I suspect that people fear not being able to afford to live in society at all, because as more jobs that were previously not automatable get replaced by increasingly sophisticated machines that can do everything that the human who did that job did at a lower overall cost, the jobless situation will rapidly become too large for even any form of socialization infrastructure to support. The relatively few rich people will survive relatively unscathed, but the vastly larger number of poorer people will have no choice but to resort to stealing, or simply starve to death.

That's what bothers people about the age of intelligent robots replacing workers, not their "precious capitalism".

But now that they denied involvement, I suspect they may be.

Most security violations don't result in personal threats being made on the safety of employees that work for the company. Unless you are suggesting that was just something Sony made up to generate sympathy, this attack on Sony was not just an illustration of poor Sony security practice.

The thread is populated by leftists, whose entire ideology is based around the industrial revolution. They can't even conceive of a post-industrial world, because it would put them out of business.

And, yes, the transition to digital and home manufacturing will make the cost of living implode. If I don't need piles of DVDs and books, because it's all just bits on a hard drive, I don't need rooms to store them. If I can build most of the things I need on a 3D printer when I need them, I don't need to keep many things at all around when I'm not using them. I may not even need a house at all.

But, no, rather than deal with reality, the leftists fantasize about the GLORIOUS WORKERS RISING UP TO SEIZE THE ROBOT FACTORIES FROM THE EVIL 1%!

Which is why anyone of clue should just laugh at them. Who needs the Glorious People's Resource Allocation Committee telling them what to do when they have a 3D printer in their garage?

The real story here is automation putting leftists out of a job.

Weren't those the exact same words that were used against Sony?

And, uh, who's going to be paying the taxes, when no-one is working?

Are you seriously claiming that humans won't be able to find anything useful to do that others will pay them for?

Take a look at documentaries from the 40s to 60s, at the peak of the making-humans-work-like-machines era, marvel at how much utterly monotonous work people used to be forced to do because we didn't have the technology to replace them with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS! and then marvel again at how, despite replacing all those people with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS!, most people who want to work can still find a job.

It's the people who claim that EVIL ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS! who are basing their position on faith, not facts. It's just another tiresome leftist ploy to steal money from the productive to give to the unprductive.

No, that's what happens when you raise the minimum wage while keeping interest rates so low that the cost of capital makes automation much cheaper than humans. Rather than pay people to do stuff, you just borrow money to install machines that do it, instead.

You and your comrades in government are effectively paying corporations to get rid of human employees, just so you can whine about it afterwards.

You don't get it, you see. The leftists I know tell me that the factory owners won't be able to sell stuff if the rest of us don't have money, so they'll give money to the government to give to us, so we'll be able to buy their stuff and they'll get rich.

It's clearly insane, but it apparently makes perfect sense in Lefty Logic.

The left are the greediest people on the planet ('all your stuff belong to ME!'), which is why they hate everyone who has more stuff than they do.