Brilliantly said. It remains so bizarre that, to this day, so many people have fixed conceptions (dating perhaps to the 1950s) of the economic orders of capitalism and communism (or its little sister, socialism). It's long past time to be re-evaluating whether the political narratives written over the economic constructs of the past match reality -- or were mere convenient fiction for the ruling powers of the time.

It seems quite clear to me that the root of evils in each economic system (including the preceding systems of tribal life, feudalism, and mercantilism) derive from the unequal distribution of power and resources. That is the key issue which must be solved if we are to progress to something new and better in this century. How it is to be done is a matter of great and important debate. I only know the answer lies not in violence and intimidation, as that has almost never created lasting and meaningful change in the past.

Power and wealth tend to become more concentrated in most economic and political systems. (No system that I know of has actually defeated this concentration for an period longer than a few decades, as far as I'm aware.) The technological view point may be regarded by some as more of a side channel (or rolling after-effect). You'll actually reach essentially the same conclusions regardless of whether you look at it as a political, economic, technological, or social problem, because the interconnections between each are very strong (in both principle and practice).

Do note, however, that giving up on a growth-based economy is equivalent to ending the consumer economy as we know it. The key reason we have this tremendous, constant, seemingly endless out-pouring of books, tools, entertainment, and so forth is due to the inflationary design of the economy actively encouraging investments and production to abundance. Once we eliminate debt, interest, and fractional reserve, the incentives to lend, borrow, and create money basically disappear. This will have a natural side effect of killing inflation off entirely. (The one exception would be if the state were to itself flood the market with new money, as would be possible with basic minimum income or negative income tax policies.)

The likely outcome of suddenly crushing the banking system without introducing any new powerful state policy is the economy entering a deflationary spiral. Companies not being able to borrow would cause delays and retraction of expansionary business decisions. They'd also be more likely to look for ways to increase profit in order to free capital for the future (since now they need to save first). This would encourage cutting all non-essential and non-obviously-functional employees, especially in large organizations where roles are unclear. The loss of business expansion combined with staff cuts would effectively take a lot of money out of the economy. This would combine and cascade with the effect from loss of personal loans. Contraction is almost guaranteed (again, without some form of government program which counteracts the effects).

Some, myself included, would argue that it's essentially inevitable for an exponentially growing, centrally managed, debt-and-inflation driven society to collapse. It's a matter of "when" rather than "if". It is certain that all previous civilizations have collapsed. Though this may seem tautological or circular, it can be better rephrased as "all civilizations collapse within X years" where the total lifetime is measured in at most centuries. While we can argue about their causes of collapse, many of them appear to be related (directly or indirectly) to inability to grow and expand exponentially any further.

A rather disgusting series of straw men, to be clear. Are you having fun?

The problems with communism as practiced in the USSR and China were the "seizing power through violence", "rule by fear", and "lack of any actual redistribution of the means of production" parts. Whenever communist principles have been applied without those attributes, typically in worker owned companies and local collectives, it actually has worked out reasonably well. (And when it didn't, people could, gasp, voluntarily leave. The horrors of non-totalitarian thought!)

Furthermore, attacking communism (or its lesser mixed cousin, socialism) does nothing to address the severe and obvious wrongs of common capitalist systems. It's truly bizarre to attack one system for lacking meaningful control by the people in order to support a system that lacks meaningful control by the people. Likewise with regards to fair distribution of wealth and power. The commonalities in the failures of capitalism and communism should make it patently obvious that the name of the economic system is functionally irrelevant; the same attributes are arising from the limitations, greed, and ignorance of the human beings managing the resources.

Seriously? You've never heard of the Chicago School of Economics? Or did you think it came from some small time institution?

I'm not sure about a cell phone, exactly, but definitely a high-end server. So yeah, captain panic was overestimating the capabilities of Chess grandmasters and underestimating the computing power of the typical server these days. That's not to say the computer always wins, or that you can't out-smart it by learning a lot about the idiosyncrasies of its algorithm(s), but chess AI is getting ever closer to being functionally unbeatable by a human in the 21st century. It won't be a "solved" problem yet for quite some time, though, in the sense of the AI being able to literally predict, adapt, and win every possible game. Even on the rather limited scope of the chess board, the number of possible games and moves within the game grows at an exponential pace. The length of the game could potentially go out to thousands of moves, even though this is absurdly unlikely in practice. That puts a high theoretical bound on the amount of computation and memory required which is absurdly greater than actually needed in practice for an AI to stomp even very good humans.

Energy and material costs are really the only thing that makes me doubt the otherwise-inevitable automation revolution. If the power efficiency of new computing architectures stops improving, that will put a definite dent into the ability to automate absolutely everything in society.

It's kind of sad you were down-rated to invisibility. Other than the hyperbole, this is a perfectly appropriate response to the naivety and complacence of the GP. I really have to wonder what the GP thinks the French Revolution was, if not the masses rising in violent fury against the extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few masters (today, the top-level engineers, their management, the owners, and the political class).

It's not actually clear that machines cannot manipulate abstract symbols. Indeed, if we ever solve the hard AI problem (a computer with the same learning/intelligence capacity as a human), the solution will necessarily be able to do that.

As for the arts, procedural generation of artistic content is already possible (depending on what you want, of course). It's still in the infancy stages, but I find it likely that the underlying techniques will improve a lot in the next few decades. We may not like to admit it, but music and paintings are basically just patterns of sound and light organized in ways we find amusing. With the right set of algorithms, machines certainly can produce those patterns (and even a limitless supply of them). Machine learning would even allow change in style over time. For those who question quality, I find it a bit hard to believe that a machine could do any worse than some abstract artists, to be honest.

The number of new jobs created simply does not match the number of job seekers anymore. That's the huge part you're missing. Go study the data for a while. The actual data by respected researchers, not official government figures on unemployment, that is. (The official line on unemployment and underemployment never needs to be checked, because all it ever says is "everything's fine over here, problem must be with all of you". Always the same message, regardless of circumstances, time, place, or economic system.)

Technology improvement has already put us into an age where work can be done ever more efficiently by fewer people. The only real constraint I see on this trend is matter and energy. If these improvements drop off because of physical limits, then we won't need to worry about all the mind-boggling implications of a robot-driven society. If they don't, however, we're increasingly headed for a civilization where wealth and power will either necessarily be concentrated very deeply or distributed very widely.

Indeed. Immigration is nearly always a net win for the world economy. Now, the local economy can be a different story.

However, immigration will very probably eventually die down. All it takes is two assumptions: (1) that population growth in the third world follows a similar trend as it has in the first world, and (2) that technology and capital generally ignore national borders, moving either literally in space or merely figuratively through remote services. These two premises would tend to eliminate practically all economic reason for migration trends, leading to a modest baseline exchange rate for cultural and political reasons alone.

No one should be planning on having immigration save us from anything over the long run.

How many cheerleaders does the typical oligarch need? A hundred? A thousand?

Who wants to sign up first?

The dilithium crystal matrix can't take any more, Cap'n.

That is proper modern steganography, yes. It's a relatively new development compared to the long history of steganography. The key question, though, is if you're going to use encryption on your source data anyway, why go so far as to hide the cipher text inside a special, different container? Presumably, the answer has something to do the relative amount of work of detection. However, it seems like it would be easier and more effective to hide the encrypted data in a large sea of entropy (on whichever storage device). That will be harder to sort through than any mere individual file.

As far as I can tell, the only real advantage of steganography is that if no one is looking for it, they won't find anything odd. With encrypted data, the high entropy state appears to be gibberish when interpreted by any normal means, and thus looks out of the ordinary on computer systems full of low entropy data.

Your first point/paragraph is why steganography can't replace good encryption as a data hiding technique. Steganography is much older than strong cryptographic encryption, but likewise it is much more limited in its capacities. When one relies on steganography, that person is taking a gamble that the method of data obscuration is never discovered. With encryption, assuming the algorithm is actually cryptographically sound, the discovery of the algorithm and even its specific implementation is not a big concern. It was often already known ahead of time anyway.

The whole trick to encryption, of course, is figuring out how to hide the keys where the user can reach them, but no one else can. There's no perfect solution to that problem. Any key that can be remembered is likely to be vulnerable to dictionary or other types of pattern attacks, and some even to brute force evaluation. Keys that can't be remembered need to be recorded, and then that requires defending a particular physical setting (place and time) essentially indefinitely against unknown adversaries of potentially great capability.

As to your second point, yeah. It sounded like a conspiracy theory when I first read about it, but many (if not most) printers do in fact leave watermarks in nearly everything they produce. I believe (but I'm not sure) that the method is actually usually implemented in the the printer firmware or even the hardware mechanism itself, rather than the driver. If so, it's extremely difficult to bypass. As for what the FBI and others may be using it for (beyond tracking counterfeiting), these days it's really anyone's guess. The FBI, much like the CIA and the NSA, suffers from a extreme case of mission creep.