How on Earth did that rate flamebait??? I agreed with what the poster said s/he believes in, and then provided some supporting information s/he might be interested in, on how to achieve that. Again I ask, how is that flamebait? If anything I was being "informative". We sure do have some screwy moderators on this site. Is this the "-1 Disagree" I've heard about? I'm not sure how that even applies since I was agreeing with him/her! And on a week-old thread at that.

"If you look at science fiction - particularly Iain Banks and the like - what you see is a post-scarcity form of anarcho-socialism where the means of production not only automated and virtually cost-free but distributed and democratised. That the sort of thing we need - but whether it is attainable without the fantasy plot devices available in a SF story"

Yeah, it's attainable. Check this out.

Yeah, you're right. And what you're basically talking about is called Technocracy.

"No, there is another."

"If automation continues to improve productivity there will come a time when the labor of some fraction of the population is capable of fully satisfying every human being alive. The only question is at what point does that happen."

Actually, it can be scientifically predicted, and in fact already has been, and that point has already passed. It was a scientific research group called the Technical Alliance that predicted that the economy would collapse because a point of "abundance" would be achieved. The date they predicted was March 1930. Turns out that they were six months optimistic. The only reason we don't have this luxury now is because abundance requires that we get rid of scarcity economics, and those in power only maintain it because of scarcity economics, so they decided to get rid of the abundance instead.

We have no economic framework in place, but there has been one designed that would work quite well, if only enough people knew about it.

You're right. This was a lesson we learned from the great depression, which was caused (largely) by machines putting people out of work. So one of the things we did to get out of it was to make sure employment was maintained at a high level, regardless of how useful it actually is to society. We could have so many people freed up to do far more meaningful things, even if it was only a small percentage of them, we'd still be far better off.

What's wrong with eliminating the concept of money? For as long as you do it right, it looks pretty good.

You're right, it is the ultimate goal. The whole point of machines is to do work we don't want to do. The problem is that with the current economic system, income is linked directly with doing work, so as work becomes more scarce, so does purchasing power. The solution is to uncouple those two concepts. Then people will be free to do the work they want to do, and we let machines do the rest. It's not that difficult.

Actually we could have had a post-scarcity society decades ago, we have all the requirements already. Maybe not for ordering up your own rocketship to Mars, but enough to live well and get rid of money.

Except for people like my friend, who lost his steam pw, and can't get it back because it used an old e-mail account that's dead. Is it his fault? Maybe, but the point is that he has games that he paid for, has the physical media, but still can't even install let alone play because of this DRM. Does that sound right to you?

Thanks for helping me out, but it's still confusing. If they've "admitted" that this was all already being done, how can they have legalized more? Or is it that they are just claiming that it was all being done before, trying to make it look like nothing has changed when it really has?

Yeah, it does matter why they are the way they are, because if you can understand that, then you are on the way to developing a way to prevent it, perhaps even fix it for those already on a bad path. I'm not saying that there are any easy answers, but I think they are achievable. If we just dismiss these people though, nothing will ever change.

"The Fact Is"?? Has there been a scientific study that has objectively measured the "evil" in little children, and then tracked them into their teen and adult years, monitoring their levels of "evil"? If you want *facts*, yes, there are people who are born with chemical or other defects in their brains, but they make up a small number (less than 5%) of all criminal activity (if we even want to use that as a standard for "evil", but that's another debate). Really, humans are born as mostly blank slates, with a few personality tendencies, none of which are more likely to commit acts of "evil" than others. Each of them has the potential, through the shaping of how they are raised by their parents, family, school, friends, and society, as well as less direct influences like economic position, culture, art and media, to become exceptionally good or bad. There are a lot of factors to look at when trying to figure out why people like these do things, but dismissing them as 'simply evil' does nothing to help solve the problem.

So the new law expands their surveillance powers, or doesn't, and just adds more rules for them. Could someone please explain which it is for those of us without access to TFA? I really hope this isn't typical American anti-French bias.