Trying to remember where I first read this years ago (G. William Domhoff? Relates to: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.e... ) but a quirk of US politics with huge implications is that the Democratic Party were historically aligned with labor unions, which lead to all sorts of job protectionism (even ad many reforms and protections were indeed needed) -- versus Republicans who became aligned with business owners and became the part of industrial progress (but resulting in industrial progress done in a way that mostly benefits the wealthy). Because of this history going back many decades, Democrat policy made it harder for the USA to really take advantage of the abundance that mechanization (and increasingly robotics and AI) could offer -- which overlaps your point.

I like the general idea of unions, and unions are to be thanked for a lot of social progress in the USA including the 40 hour work week. That said, many years ago I wrote about the sad way most unions are playing out in the USA now. Unions now essentially maintain a private welfare state with good wages and good benefits for an every smaller number of people -- since some unions started allowing newer hires to get worse benefits than existing hires, creating a bit of a race to the bottom with different classes of union members with employee turnover. Ultimately, this issue was not one unions could fix, as it required a broader social/political change than unions could manage in the past.

See the book "Voyage from Yesteryear" for a taste of a broader alternative (a book which contributed -- according to the author -- to labor movements and the fall of the iron curtain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. ...
        Hogan's essay "What Really Brought Down Communism?" explains the reception given to the book in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, Hogan was informed that the novel had been serialized in a Polish science fiction magazine Fantastyka, and, in the absence of a functioning exchange mechanism, paid for it in Polish zÅotys credited to an account taken out in Hogan's name. The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in KrakÃw before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""

Things might have been very different in the USA if the Democratic Party could have embraced automation -- perhaps leading to a 32 hour work week sooner like Bernie Sanders advocates, but ultimately decades too late:
"AI Could Wipe Out the Working Class | Sen. Bernie Sanders"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ).

The idea of "Bullshit Jobs" and "The Abolition of Work" relate to this as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution."

https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
        You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps."

I also explored some of those ideas back around 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...

I'm reading a book right now called "Abundance" which touches on related things. It is ostensibly written by liberals and for liberals. It explores how a previous generations liberal policies (like protecting the environment) have become stumbling blocks impeding the next generation creating a greener infrastructure. Turns out, it is much easier in an ostensible democratic republic to use the law to stop development by saying "no" than to use the law to to facilitate development by saying "yes".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
        Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending. ..."

It's possible that if either the Democrats or Republicans adopt some of Yang's Forward Party agenda we might see some progress on all this? Or perhaps it is too late for much significant pro-active political change in the USA -- given the tidal wave of AI and automation likely to sweep across the globe in the next decade as reflected in the original article about what is happening right now, for example, in China?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One problem with political chaos (besides for everyone that gets hurt directly) is that it can be hard to predict what the outcome is. For example, progressive students took over the US embassy in Iran, but it was ultimately the better-organized hard-line Iranian clerics who emerged politically victorious as a result. Unfortunately, US head-in-the-sand political behavior about automation seems likely to lead to near-term political chaos when the USA can no longer effectively deny about all this global change with automation mainly happening elsewhere. In the USA, it seems conservatives right now (including big business owners) are better organized and so likely to emerge victorious (if anyone does) from chaos? Which means huge aspects of conservative political agendas will come along for the ride even if they have nothing to do with thinking about how best to build a society (like in Voyage From Yesteryear) that embraces AI, robotics, and other automation in way that benefits everyone.

A related satire by me from 2010:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Marshall Brain's Manna which inspired my satire is more deeply thought-out though:
https://marshallbrain.com/mann...

Like Bucky Fuller said:
https://libquotes.com/buckmins...
"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe"

Unfortunately, there is indeed a bit of half-truth to the notion that if violence or cruelty (or, jokingly, XML) is not working, you are not using enough of it -- and that tiny bit of half-truth is enough to support ultimately disastrous social (and sometimes, jokingly, technical) policies in the USA.

A related point from my satire: "Soon everyone was out of work [due to increased automation]. The politicians and their supporters said the solution was to lower taxes and cut social benefits to promote business investment. They tried that but the robots still got all the jobs."

I wrote much about all this (as above) circa 2008-2012 (including other things like "Post-Scarcity Princeton" and "Five Interwoven Economies"). It's both heartening to know people are now talking about the implications of advanced automation, even as it is disheartening to see the USA is probably in worse shape politically to deal with it than back then. I hope someday more and more people understand the idea in my sig (including reflection on how it might apply to Union labor contracts): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

...collected by me more than a decade ago:

"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics" https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

Here is a web page with a summary of key points of Mind Children as well as of criticism of it:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wik...

Hans was working on this book when I was a visitor in his Mobile Robot Lab at CMU (1985-1986):
"Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence"
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Ch...
      "Imagine attending a lecture at the turn of the twentieth century in which Orville Wright speculates about the future of transportation, or one in which Alexander Graham Bell envisages satellite communications and global data banks. Mind Children, written by an internationally renowned roboticist, offers a comparable experienceâa mind-boggling glimpse of a world we may soon share with our artificial progeny. Filled with fresh ideas and insights, this book is one of the most engaging and controversial visions of the future ever written by a serious scholar.
      Hans Moravec convincingly argues that we are approaching a watershed in the history of lifeâa time when the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence will begin to dissolve. Within forty years, Moravec believes, we will achieve human equivalence in our machines, not only in their capacity to reason but also in their ability to perceive, interact with, and change their complex environment. The critical factor is mobility. A computer rooted to one place is doomed to static iterations, whereas a machine on the prowl, like a mobile organism, must evolve a richer fund of knowledge about an ever-changing world upon which to base its actions.
      In order to achieve anything near human equivalence, robots will need, at the least, the capacity to perform ten trillion calculations per second. Given the trillion-fold increase in computational power since the end of the nineteenth century, and the promise of exotic technologies far surpassing the now-familiar lasers and even superconductors, Moravec concludes that our hardware will have no trouble meeting this forty-year timetable.
      But human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. In the concluding chapters Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding."

If you read it, you will see there is a fundamental moral position of AI and robotics as our children given, as is said in the article, a position that the substrate of consciousness does not matter. So people who believe that might also feel a simulation of a salamander or snail darter is as good as the biological thing?

Personally, I have my reservations about this "Mind Children" idea -- not necessarily because of the arguable issue of substrate mattering but because I think making stable cooperative AI may be a lot harder than expected in the 1980s, given it took many millions of years to shape our organic intelligence by evolutionary means. So, it seems plausible to me that we might create stable-seeming or cooperative-seeming AI "mind children" and they might go unstable or uncooperative in a few years (after humanity and the rest of the biosphere has perhaps been "retired" in some fashion) -- leaving our part of the universe empty of awareness.

So, I think Hans makes good insightful points, but they are also very optimistic points overall. But ultimately, in the long term, Hans may well be right (if we get lucky).

And frankly, "Mind Children" is a far more optimistic and hopeful view for the future of humanity (or whatever it becomes) than what seems likely arising from current AIs being designed by the most competitive companies to act in competitive ways in capitalistic businesses to accumulate the most fiat-dollar ration units as quickly as possible. That approach to creating AI just does not seem to me likely to end well, as it ignores the concern in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." The only winner win such a race to build competitive AI will likely be the AI itself (if even that).

I think a way to make a healthy happy future more likely for humanity and whatever comes next with "Mind Children" is to build a socially-better world now, given that it is plausible that our moral path out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with out moral path into it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The story opens early in the 21st century, as an automated space probe is being prepared for a mission to explore habitable exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system. However, Earth appears destined for a global war which the probe designers fear that humanity may not survive. It appears that the only chance for the human species is to reestablish itself far away from the conflict but there is no time left for a crewed expedition to escape Earth. The team, led by Henry B. Congreve, change their mission priority and quickly modify the design to carry several hundred sets of electronically coded human genetic data. Also included in this mission of embryo space colonization is a databank of human knowledge, robots to convert the data into genetic material and care for the children and construct habitats when the destination is reached, and a number of artificial wombs. The probe's designers name it the Kuan-Yin after the bodhisattva of childbirth and compassion. ..."

See also "Unschooling" (although what is discussed in the article still seems to have a compulsory component):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Unschooling is a practice of self-driven informal learning characterized by a lesson-free and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, under the belief that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood, and therefore useful it is to the child."

Related: "A Functional Medicine Approach to Autism" by Dr. Mark Hyman
https://drhyman.com/blogs/cont...
        "TODAY MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE that Autism is a genetic brain disorder. I'm here to tell you that this isn't true. The real reason we are seeing increasing rates of autism is simply this: Autism is a systemic body disorder that affects the brain. A toxic environment triggers certain genes in people susceptible to this condition. And research supports this position. ...
        Every child with autism has unique genetics, causes or triggers. And it is not usually one thing but a collection of insults, toxins and deficiencies piled on susceptible genetics that leads to biochemical train wrecks we see in these children ...
        [The article then goes on to show a case study of a child whose "autism" was reversed by multiple interventions which were mostly dietary but also involved antibiotics, antifungals, and probiotics.]"

by James P. Hogan because people have moved beyond zero-sum competition via capitalism to an economic theory of infinite abundance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict."

While any advanced AI by itself could arguably pose an existential risk to much or all of humanity, creating such AIs quickly via competition makes the risk many times greater.

See also Alfie Kohn's "The Case Against Competiton": https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
"One after another, researchers across the country have concluded that children do not learn better when education is transformed into a competitive struggle. Why? First, competition often makes kids anxious and that interferes with concentration. Second, competition doesnâ(TM)t permit them to share their talents and resources as cooperation does, so they canâ(TM)t learn from one another. Finally, trying to be Number One distracts them from what theyâ(TM)re supposed to be learning. It may seem paradoxical, but when a student concentrates on the reward (an A or a gold star or a trophy), she becomes less interested in what sheâ(TM)s doing. The result: Performance declines."

Or Dan Pink's on motivation, emphasizing autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the key to intrinsic motivation and creativity.
"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Paraphrasing what others have said, the only winner in a competitive race to build AI quickly will be the AI itself.

And going further, if we can't keep many competitive corporations and their money-loving human leadership aligned with human values (where in theory humans elements of such companies could be tried in court as a deterrent to bad behavior), what hope is there to keep random AIs made at reckless top speed aligned with human values?
https://money.howstuffworks.co...

Me from 2000 on how machine intelligence is already here via corporations:
https://dougengelbart.org/coll...
"These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the political/social process of its own ends)."

Irony is the key insight, as in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Sorry, it is a kind-of subtle point on using military robotics to enforce a status quo in which most people are forced to work under threat of vast discomfort of some sort of others (even if that means using military robots in some other country, like the USA using drones in the Middle East). It's also an oblique reference to what so many Slashdot articles have been about -- using technology to monitor and direct workers.

For context, consider civilian causalities even in narrowly target military campaigns using drones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Taken together, independent estimates from the non-governmental organizations New America and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggest that civilians made up between 7.27% to 15.47% of deaths in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia from 2009-2016, with a broadly similar rate from 2017-2019. Civilian casualties as a percentage of overall deaths were highest in Yemen and lowest in Somalia."

In general, historically, civilian casualties in almost any war outnumber military casualties by a factor of 2 or more though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And we might well see such numbers if "Slaughterbots" comes true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition software to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria."

Consider though what is happening right now in Ukraine and Russia:
"4.5 Million Drones Is A Lot Of Drones. It's Ukraine's New Production Target For 2025. The Russian production goal is slightly lower."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...

Consider what millions of drones could do instead to harvest food or make stuff.

"Drones Revolutionize Fruit Harvesting with AI-Powered Precision"
https://dronexl.co/2025/04/25/...

"Autonomous drones herald the future of constructing and repairing tall buildings"
https://www.ribaj.com/products...

Millions of robots design to create instead of destroy could potentially have made Ukraine into a post-scarcity paradise instead of making parts of it into a modern-day hellscape. (Same could have been said for the US invasion of Iraq many years earlier...)

But that was not a choice that people involved (including other countries like the USA) saw was possible, in part because most people still don't understand the idea in my sig (distilled from the thoughts of many others, especially James P. Hogan): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

So, does the Ukraine conflict make any sense from a post-scarcity perspective? Millions of drones are being created to kill people and blow stuff up in order to control area of the Ukraine -- which means control of the *workers* in an area and thus receiving part of the wealth those workers produce -- when the same numbers of robots could instead be used directly to produce whatever it is that either side thinks they will get from controlling the area. Yeah, I know politics of war is complicated and full of all kinds of moral arguments on all sides. But from a purely physical goods perspective, that is why such military conflicts are increasingly absurd given our advanced technology, as the military drones are in a physical sense ultimately being used to fight over who gets to control the human workers and the goods they produce and the tax revenues and privatized gains from all that (while socializing all the costs). Natural resources in an area have no economic value without workers to turn them into products and services.

That said, if you want sci-fi about using tech and robots to control workers, Marshall Brain's Manna explores that in depth. Example:
https://marshallbrain.com/mann...
"The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called "Manna", version 1.0*. ... Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance."
https://marshallbrain.com/mann...
"It doesn't matter if you are a hard worker or a slacker -- once you put on the headset, you are going to be working every minute of the day or you are gone. The system has already fired five people."

Of course, this is not exactly sci-fi anymore if you look at what companies like, say, Amazon are doing.
https://www.theregister.com/20...
    ""The findings reveal that employers can weaponize elements or effects of algorithmic management against unions via repurposing devices that algorithmically control workers, engaging in 'algorithmic slack-cutting,' and exploiting patterns of social media activity encouraged by algorithmic management," the paper says.
      "Algorithmic slack-cutting" is a term the author uses to describe the softening of the "electronic whip," a characterization borrowed from prior research on algorithmic work demands. It's the proverbial carrot as opposed to the stick - removing the mental burden of being under automated, software-driven oversight. The argument goes that basically, it's such a relief to a worker when it's removed that it feels like a benefit.
      A cited example in the study comes from a warehouse worker's Time-Off-Task tracking system - which tracks the number of minutes that workers aren't actively working - being disabled to win over workers during the union campaign. This allowed workers to take bathroom breaks without being on the clock, ostensibly to soften attitudes toward management."

Not quite the same, but consider this Star Trek episode where disembodied brains (AIs?) control people via shock collars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There's also a Dust (I think) sci-fi short about a pregnant woman being forced to were a shock collar "protect" her unborn child, where all here actions are monitored by some sort of computer (I think) and shocks administered supposedly for her own good and the good of the child when she does not comply. I could not easily find the exact title right now though.

I found a different movie though which also uses collars to enforce behavior:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Frank is sentenced to 12 years imprisonment at Camp Holliday, an experimental prison where each convict is fitted with an electronic collar containing an explosive device which is electronically connected to another inmate. If any inmate tries to escape from Camp Holliday, or is even just separated from their collar-mate by more than 100 yards, both their collars will explode."

There is a scene in Diamond Age where nanites are used to force someone to move to execute their own death sentence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The movie Robocop initially has a robot enforcing human behavior with "20 seconds to comply".
"You Have 20 Seconds to Comply" ROBOCOP 1987" [warning: clip has some gore in it]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Robot guards are a growing industry in general: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=robo...

Also related: "Everything We Know About Samsung's Machine Gun Robots"
https://www.slashgear.com/8250...

The Colossus supercomputer in "Colossus: the Forbin Project" uses threat of nuclear war to force people to do what it requests:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://archive.org/details/co...

Although here's a sort of reverse dystopia from 1947 where robots end up insisting humans do no work ever, showing the problems with any extreme: :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/......
"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 more, 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."

A more modern vision on that dystopia from this year:
"A Realistic Scenario of AI Takeover"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This Brain Scribbles episode explores how artificial intelligence slowly integrates into our daily lives through simple conveniences. The video walks through a timeline of how these small changes build towards a future with deeply integrated AI. Watch now to rethink artificial intelligence."

Thanks for the reply and the Astra Taylor recommendation (who is new to me):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Taylor grew up in Athens, Georgia, and was unschooled until age 13 when she enrolled in ninth grade.[4] At 16 she abandoned high school to attend classes at the University of Georgia; at the university she studied Deleuze and Guattari under Ronald L. Bogue. She has described herself as a "teenage Deleuzian."
        Taylor enrolled at Brown University, where she attended classes for a year before dropping out. Reflecting on her decision to leave, Taylor stated "Why had I felt compelled to enroll in an Ivy League school, to excel by the standards of conventional education and choose a 'difficult' major, instead of making my own way? What was I afraid of?" Taylor completed a Master of Arts in liberal studies at The New School, though stated that she ultimately "wearied" of academia. ..."

She's probably like this then by Manuel de Landa (and you might too):
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Thanks for the moving short sci-fi story describing what such a shoplifter-chasing-robot world might feel like.

Here was a story I wrote on a related robotic-enforced dystopia (though with more positive ending):
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

See my other posts here for other sci-fi stories by various authors (Brain, Pohl, and Hogan) showing alternative futures using potentially-abundance-creating robots from a post-scarcity perspective.

The Skills of Xanadu by Theodore Sturgeon is another positive story -- although robots are specifically not there by choice in favor of wireless-networked-wearable-computer-mediated skill sharing (an impressive set of ideas for 1956, which helped inspire Ted Nelson to create hypertext for the Xanadu system, which helped lead to the World-Wide Web).
"The skills of Xanadu (Episode 8 of 14)"
https://archive.org/details/pr...
https://ia801205.us.archive.or...
"He remembered something Tanyne had said once, casually, about men and their devices:
      "Ever since there were human beings, there has been conflict between Man and his machines. They will run him or he them; it's hard to say which is the less disastrous way. But a culture which is composed primarily of men has to destroy one made mostly of machines, or be destroyed. It was always that way. We lost a culture once on Xanadu. Didn't you ever wonder, Bril, why there are so few of us here? And why almost all of us have red hair?"
      Bril had, and had secretly blamed the small population on the shameless lack of privacy, without which no human race seems to be able to whip up enough interest in itself to breed readily.
      "We were billions once," said Tan surprisingly. "We were wiped out. Know how many were left? Three!""

P.S. One other vision of a better future involving robots is James P. Hogan's 1982 sc-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" which I am rereading for the fifth or so time (this time via an audiobook version).
https://archive.org/details/vo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict."

In particular, on the "shoplifting and robots" theme, there is a scene where teenager Jay Fallows comes back from visiting a "store" on the planet Chironia where he just walked out with a bunch of high-quality good like hiking boots, a backpack, and a painting -- and his parents are extremely suspicious of his story that it's just the way things work there according to some local teenagers and also the robot who ran the place.

The 1954 short story "The Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl also explores the topic of dealing with a surplus of robot-produced goods. An audio version is available here:
"The Midas Plague - Frederik Pohl (Novella)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. 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. The story follows the marriage between a lower-class man and an upper-class woman."

More on the Midas Plague story and related ones here (but spoilers):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Thanks for your insightful points on potential drone misuse. The issue goes even deeper, as I suggest here: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

So, just think of all the robots that will be deployed to maintain an artificial scarcity of consumer goods when roughly the same amount of robots might just produce the goods at little-to-no cost (like explained in Marshall Brain's Manna):
https://marshallbrain.com/mann...

Or as Reddit user harebrane put it recently (replying to a comment of mine): https://www.reddit.com/r/singu...
"The manner in which I've discussed that paradox with various AI's is positive sum tools of abundance in the hands of zero sum extractive actors. I mean it's slightly harder to parse, but pretty concise. I also agree with the whole concept as you frame it - tools of abundance and amplification in the hands of people who only thinks in terms of zero sum scarcity and belligerence making us all more insecure. That said, a key point of framing it as positive sum vs. zero sum - is that life as a concept is not compatible, AT ALL, with zero sum. Every ecosystem, every organism, is arrayed around the central concept that entropy takes a bite out of every single transaction. You HAVE to produce more than is needed, and invest in the well being of not only your peers but your prey, or the whole board eventually disappears. Zero sum is a game that ends in extinction *of the winner.*"

Something I wrote on this in 2001 and posted to gnu.misc.discuss: https://groups.google.com/g/gn...
        "... I definitely do not want to see a future world of only proprietary intellectual property where basically everything I want to do requires agreeing to endless licenses and royalty payments, such as described in [Richard Stallman's essay] "right-to-read". ...
        However, on a practical basis, living in our society as it is right now, any software developer is going to handle lots of packets of information from emails to applications to program modules under a variety of explicit or implied licenses. If a developer is going to do this in a way that makes his or her work most useful to the community (under the terms he or she so chooses), proper attention must be given to the licensing status of all works received and distributed, especially those that form the basis for new derived works to be distributed. Note that even in the case of purely GPL'd works, one still needs to know that a user contributing an extension to a GPL'd work was the original author and/or he or she has permission to distribute the patch (if say an employer owns all the contributor's work).
        My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence" license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)? ...
        For example, consider this situation. I go to the Choral Public domain site and download a MIDI tune picked at random, say "Ecce nunc benedicite" by "Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina" edited by "Claudio
Macchi". Let's say I like it and want to pass it on. ...
        As soon as I have this file on my computer, much of the "meta data" about licensing is lost, since the meta-data is not all kept in the same file but is implicit from having the file on the site. If I pass the file to you, how do you know it is freely redistributeable? Do you tak my word for it? Do you check the site? Am I myself even sure enough what license it is under when I downloaded it that I can give you assurances you can use it? Why should you trust me if I do? Did you get the identical version I downloaded, or did I slip in a change which I might later use to make a claim against you if you use the file in a work of your own? If I (not the author) bundle the midi file with a CPDL license in a zip file, how do you know I had any right to do that? How much time do you need to take to verify the situation? ...
        Note that ultimately, having such meta-data in every file might require operating system support, or at least very smart tools, like a MIDI player that ignores the meta-data when actually playing the file. That in turn might require a more sophisticated repository approach to storing all file data (at a minimum, perhaps "license forks" like the Macintosh has "data forks", although this doesn't address the notion of one license covering multiple files taken as a whole). ..."

I prepared a five minute "lightning talk" for LibrePlanet 2021 on "Empowering users through Dialogue Mapping using IBIS".

https://libreplanet.org/wiki/L...

The text of the talk in IBIS outline format with some minor changes is available here.
https://pdfernhout.net/librepl...

That talk is a much-shortened version of a longer talk I gave in July 2019 for the Cognitive Systems Institute Group Speaker Series where I suggested using AI to help with the Dialogue Mapping process:
https://twitter.com/sumalaika/...

More on Dialogue Mapping with IBIS:
https://cognexus.org/id41.htm
"Dialogue Mapping is a radically inclusive facilitation process that creates a diagram or 'map' that captures and connects participants' comments as a meeting conversation unfolds. It is especially effective with highly complex or "Wicked" problems that are wrought with both social and technical complexity, as well as a sometimes maddening inability to move forward in a meaningful and cost effective way. Dialogue Mapping creates forward progress in situations that have been stuck; it clears the way for robust decisions that last. It is effective because it works with the non-linear way humans really think, communicate, and make decisions. ... As the people in the meeting speak, the facilitator paraphrases and captures what they are saying in a hypertext diagram on the screen. ... The icons represent the basic elements of the Dialogue Mapping grammar (called IBIS): Questions, Ideas, Pros and Cons. ... In Dialogue Mapping, as the conversation unfolds and the map grows, each person can see a summary of the meeting discussion so far. The map serves as a "group memory," virtually eliminating the need for participants to repeat themselves to get their points made."

Dialogue Mapping could potentially help people who take different sides on so-called "settled issues" to help understand the different points of view, assumptions, and priorities involved.

As an example, while not exactly Dialogue Mapping with IBIS, Kialo uses a pro/con format to structure online discussions related to controversial topics. Here are some Kialo maps on abortion:
https://www.kialo.com/search?q...

A specific example there: https://www.kialo.com/should-a...

People may not all agree after participating in such systems, but at least they will get a better understanding of where specifically they agree or disagree with others as they all collaborate to build a visualization of the topic.