You miss the parts that are very close to Linguistics and Information science: Ontologies, Information retrieval, Semiotics, and the all-important Human-Computer Interaction - how to build a computation environment that's efficient for humans to interact with. Maybe this is not a well-defined problem in a mathematical sense, but it's at the core of all programming activity beyond the level of micro-instructions.

This is not merely cross-disciplinary work; those are also essential parts of the science of computation, little related to mathematics yet highly relevant to all projects in the computing field, either in research or business - although many are unaware of their relevance.

Who says there would be no constraints? Merely because there's no threat of hunger and cold, doesn't mean that creating art would have no challenges of its own. Many artists in history could create their craft because they were wealthy enough not to need other work.

Even if there is not a pressing need, artists can use self-imposed limits to explore the possibilities of their medium of choice.

Do you have a suggestion on how to modify our behavior to keep the sun from exploding?

If I check out the windows and there were rioters and police shooting at them, I'd be wary of going out that day, yes.

Have you ever heard of the Pascal wager?

The (un)likelyhood of an unwelcome outcome should be weighted by the severity of harm if it happens, to make a rational informed decision.

I said "Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent"... or also if you can't choose and are forced into it. Life is long and you never know what tomorrow brings.

With a basic income, you have a choice that you didn't have before. This is what those extra taxes are buying you (in addition to reducing competence because other people will choose not to apply to the remaining jobs). Being universal, you also benefit from them.

What if the product is not created by a person but by a robot? That option didn't ever exist in the past.

Because I have to pay taxes to support them?

Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent.

...making us less competitive internationally. Which causes more jobs to be outsourced...

Do you realize that those arguments wouldn't apply if the rent was truly universal? I.e. if *all* people could apply for them, not just people from a single country, all workers in the world would face the same increases in costs, thus not making any difference in their competitiveness.

...or just vanish due to being economically unproductive.

Again you're assuming 1) that such thing would happen and 2) that it's a bad thing. Why?

By converted, you mean "wrapped", right? Banks sinply don't throw away well tested code that runs core business logic merely to update the language, they build interfaces around them and keep then running. Surely new systems are built in new languages (mostly Java) and old systems will be ultimately shut down, but it doesn't make sense for the parts where requirements remain the same, and the principles of banking have been the same for centuries.

And high performance scientific code is often easier to write in Fortran than C. When you add that to the knowledge an already swt-up environments in academy, there's still a relevant community trusting their libraries for their computing needs.

By that metric, COBOL and Fortran are the most relevant and successful, as they're in wide use at core infrastructure in banking and scientific computing respectively.

s/core sharing / code sharing/

Maybe it's time to give up the open source movement? Our leaders are getting old and the new generation does not understand our need for freedom and in some cases they dont have enough coding skills.

The day open source is forgotten and core sharing depends merely on developer's goodwill, without clear reuse licenses, we will face all the Unix wars all over again.

There are clear signs of that already happening in the mobile OS area, where big corps are busy using patents to invalidate the benefits that their FLOSS code base provide.

The advantage of open source is that it allows developers to advance the industry fast through collaboration on common infrastructure while competing on quality and features, rather than competing on who owns the largest amount of intellectual property. Next generation developers would be wise to learn that lesson from history or they will have to re-learn it from experience.

Unchallenged presence is not a measure of success if it's unsustainable. Our current widespread presence is dependent upon a huge dependency of non-renewable resources.

The real test of success is when a species is integrated in its environment with a relationship that relies solely on renewable resources, so that their presence in that environment may run indefinitely. We are nowhere near that point yet.

Nature is full of periods where a process runs wild and fills their environment, only to be instantly wiped out when the resources required to maintain the process are exhausted. Those processes or species do not count as "successful" in terms of evolution if they become ultimately extinct.

I've known too many people who were content doing absolutely nothing.

You say that as if it was a bad thing. How does it affect you negatively?

Making people work for their wages makes sense.

That's not a given, in particular if the work they would be forced to do is not productive but "show off", as you suggest. Do you mind to elaborate that idea and justify it, to explain what it makes sense to you?

Demand for workers can shrink but the supply will not and wages will bottom out and as they do so will demand for goods, effectively creating a catch-22.

That's why a universal basic income is such a beautiful concept. It would remove from the equation human survival as an individual incentive - thus reducing the supply of workers when the work offers are not attractive enough, solving that particular problem.

If everyone had their basic survival guaranteed through an unconditional minimum wage, the work market would be driven by individual initiatives to create pretty things and to improve from that basic status by pursuing luxury.

The main fear against the UBI is that those incentives would not attract enough workers to support the needs of mankind as a whole, but I don't see evidence that this would be the case - the drive to be creative and improve your personal status are pretty strong ones.