The thread title; my aim is to block the discussion entirely. It's a silly game that does not clarify the language, and does not have any impact on physics. Logic says that particles cannot be waves, but the world does what it likes, and sensible people change their ideas to suit.

To imagine that the rules of language or mathematics can overrule the world is called 'magical thinking'.

In general, it is ill-advised to try and tell the world what it can and cannot do according to your ideas and symbols. Rather, let the world tell you how to operate your ideas and symbols so as to conform to what it does.

I think you rather idealize "humanity," much in the way romantics idealized "the people" (as if there was such a thing). — SophistiCat

Au contraire, I diagnose humanity as the source of the non-ideal and of all the other problems. Thus for example humanity is as real as human caused global warming and what humans do, they can stop doing. So global warming is a simple problem to solve and most of the research work has been done already by folks who care about such stuff. Simple enough to convince almost everyone to do what is necessary, except - governments are corrupt and do not act in our interests. Similarly, nuclear weapons are an easily solved problem - dismantle them and don't make any more. It is the collective madness of government that prevents it.

I voted political corruption, because without the ability of humanity to act in its own best interests, none of the merely practical problems can even be addressed properly. Physical problems are trivial, it is psychological problems that are intractable.

Cognitive neuroscience has been heavily based on neurological disorders, brain lesions and brain injures. Disorder and absence can show what constitutes normality. — Andrew4Handel

Imagine a computer science based on what happens when you hit the buggers with a hammer...

I have not made up my mind that space is finite and discrete — Devans99

This is entirely to be recommended. I too like to make my ideas conform to reality rather than try to argue reality into conforming with my ideas.

If it is a question worth asking, then the answer must be that it is worth living, if only to ask the question.

But I suspect it is not worth asking. Rather one finds out in each case, or does not, but only too late.

The academy exists because learning is social.

One stands on the shoulders of the ancients.

Don't send your daughter down the mine Mrs Worthington. Especially in her best dress freshly cleaned and ironed.

But this does not answer either, really. The efficient way to space travel is with minimum population and genetic diversity in storage. Even when the economy is identical with entropy, robots are more efficient than humans.

As you see, you have provided us with a holiday from philosophy. We're all doomed, you're probably right. but it's bin fun watching you squirm between Nils Nos and I. :heart:

so you just expect that to magically change based on which disney movie? — Lif3r

No, I don't expect it to change by some manipulation. That is rather the point. You keep on with the same old and expect a different result. And even you can see that it doesn't work. So stop. Take a look around.

Buy a gun. If you are smart, buy several. Don't trust anyone, — Lif3r

Really poor advice. This is what brought us to this pitch. The bunker mentality.

The problem is that we have learned to control the environment, but have no idea how to control ourselves.

There is no depth of depravity to which the economy will not descend with enthusiasm if a profit can be made.

They could invest that money, loan it out, start a business with it, save it, gamble it, etc. there's a billion things they could do with that money and it would still be an economy. — BitconnectCarlos

Sure, they could paper the walls with it. But it wouldn't be an economy, because no one cares what they do. You imagine everything will continue as a normal economy, but it won't, and you need to explain, in this brave new world what investment even means, what property means, what a loan means. Clearly you do not understand and cannot conceive that this whole money structure can fail, I cannot explain it any better, sorry.

I asked what is wrong with robots largely taking over production/manufacturing and humans moving into more service-related jobs. — BitconnectCarlos

I did try to explain. There is nothing 'wrong' with any arrangement you might suggest, except that it does not accord with economics. Adam serves Eve in some way to earn money, and Eve serves Adam. Meanwhile the robots do the farming and mining and building and so on. A nice picture. Except what do Adam and Eve do with the money they earn, apart from pass it back and forth between them? The robots have no use for it, they just produce stuff and pass it around. There's no economy.

Unless all the robots belong to Simon the serpent, and he collects the money from Adam and Eve in return for his robot produce, and Adam and Eve serve him, to earn money. But Simon the serpent might need a few dozen servants for delights that the robots cannot totally fulfil to his satisfaction, but not millions, or billions. Again, there's no economy.

And if there are 100 Simons or 10,000, they have nothing to speak of for each other, and likewise no use for the millions.

Well yet again I disagree. Government and authority has utterly failed so far to deal with any of the things you mention. What government will inevitably be doing is clinging on to power even when that power is reduced to mere mass slaughter, in exactly the same way that the rich will. For God's sake stop encouraging them.

This explains the collapse of the centre in politics. We cannot go on playing rich man poor man; one or the other will have to be eliminated.

For 10,000 years or so, our poor old brains have been working and working to make life easier - the wheel to save carrying and dragging stuff, roads to make wheeling easier, cooking to save chewing so much, the blender to save chewing at all. tractors to save digging, farms to save hunting and gathering.

And now we have arrived to such an extent that one can make a living selling the services of someone who makes a living encouraging the willing to work on a treadmill for nothing doing nothing.

It's game over, but no one has noticed.

there are basically four possible outcomes of complete automation: — Pfhorrest

I think you are mistaken. Without work, there can be no rich and poor. You have perhaps indicated possible paths, but the end cannot be a continuation of any economic class system. the shortage game must end. There is no point in the rich and powerful maintaining the poor in poverty; neither fun nor profit. It's game over.

An end to government seems likely too.

...so all we need do to save the world is to change human nature. — Banno

Yeah. We can do that can't we? Brain plasticity, social facilitation and so on?

Much of socialist or community thought is all about reconceptualizing social relations, especially property relations. I suspect you're imagining "socialism/communism" to be Soviet Russia or the like, — Pfhorrest

Well I don't want to argue about the terminology, if you have some workable ideas, never mind the ism they are claimed by, let's discuss them. But at the moment I see the invisible hand operating on rich and poor alike, and little sign of an alternative.

Well, we have the welfare system of the Nordic countries. [...] Why would that not work for the foreseeable future of automation? — Qmeri

It is still founded on the work ethic. When we do not work, what distinguishes rich from poor in a way that is remotely justifiable? That there should be a small group that owns the world and lets us live is no longer thinkable.

Coordinated distribution — schopenhauer1

Yes please.

If money and labor is completely taken out of the equation, it is all about power — schopenhauer1

What is the source of power in this brave new world? Is it maybe this: -

It would require people trust each other — schopenhauer1

In essence, it is already trust, aka 'confidence' that allows the economy to function. I think that trust (in the sanctity of money and property) has to be withheld, in order for a new trust to begin, that would depend on a free and open system of distribution, whereby if someone has gotten a little greedy, we can all see it and know where the resources have gone.

I very clearly didn't give very specific ideas — Qmeri

Yes, that's the whole problem in a nutshell. We'll get along much better if you will consent to being a little less clear about your lack of specificity, or a little more specific about your lack of clarity, or something, or nothing.

a singular example of a creationist being hard to convince through rational means — Qmeri

So you are saying that you do not know what rational means are? Or that you do? Or that you do not know whether you do or not? Perhaps it was irrational of me to presume you at least thought you knew whereof you spoke.

My text never assumed anything about me being rational or someone being irrational. It proposed that if someone is irrational, they seem to be hard to convince trough rational means. — Qmeri

And that proposal only makes sense if you are the arbiter of rationality.

Let me manipulate you into having the right attitude to this problem.

It is irrational to suppose that other people are irrational and that I am rational. So let's presume that we are all irrational and all open to manipulation by other irrational people.

I think on this basis we would be well advised to not manipulate each other but to try our best to help each other towards rationality without claiming to be the source thereof.

Labor is only virtuous under an economic model. — schopenhauer1

Yes indeed. I am not personally advocating labour, I am describing the economic model. I advocate changing the model.

What else are you looking for? — schopenhauer1

I'm looking for a model that doesn't entail most of us dying.

So the only way through is a cross-party agreement — Tim3003

When there was no overall majority, that was a possibility, but not now. The tories have their majority, they can damn well take the responsibility with it.

So, one more try to put this starkly and simply.

The invisible hand is the social pressure that guides individuals through the operation of their self interest. It is not a necessary causative law, because any individual as labourer or as capitalist is free to defy it and starve, but on average, and given the social and psychological status quo, it is inexorable. And this invisible hand at the present stage of development, mandates the annihilation of most of humanity, because they are no longer profitable. This is already happening.

Proposed solutions based on money and ownership (UBI and socialism/communism) inevitably fail because they continue the social (financial) arrangements that produce the invisible hand. Nothing less than a new conception, (or possibly an old conception) of social relations including the property relation, and the nature of social virtue will suffice to remedy the situation.

Hume replaced Allah in the Islamic occassionalist system with matter as the prime mover (following Hobbes's on dynamics) — Gregory

Hume's critique was epistemological, and not ontological.

But the first principle of economics is 'produce or die.'

This was true in the Soviet Union. If you didn't work, you didn't get fed. It's almost 2020 now and people can make a living streaming video games. — BitconnectCarlos

I'm not interested in the Soviet Union as it no longer exists. I am not making political points here and I am not claiming we ought to be producing cars or anything else. But can you eat live streamed video games? If you cannot, you will need to trade directly or indirectly with a food producer. You are providing a service he is a producer. Man cannot live on service alone. Someone has to produce the devices, the houses, and the medicines and the food, but robots don't watch live-streamed video.

Is it too much shock, or am I not making it clear? You philosophers and techies will be fine - for a while.

Already in mature democracies people are dying on the streets because they cannot afford housing, medicine, or decent food. The value of unskilled and semi-skilled labour is falling. Labour is hugely expensive and robots are getting cheaper and cheaper.

new jobs will be created in other sectors. — BitconnectCarlos

As manufacturing jobs shrink, service jobs are expanding. However, every servant needs a master, every service needs to be paid for. So for the poor, the hairdresser gets replaced with a DIY trimmer. So the hairdresser becomes poor. Manufacturing is the source, and services are ancillary. A society that is all services and no manufacturing collapses. The economy game stops. See rustbelt in the US, or anywhere North of Manchester in the UK. I'm not the top line economist, but I think this is fairly basic stuff. One can see already that the end of manufacturing is the end of society on a small scale, so it should not take an extraordinary feat of imagination to see the implications as the process continues.

I'm deliberately staying clear of international affairs so as to keep things simple, and obviously some communities and some countries are at a very different stage. But the first principle of economics is 'produce or die.' People are starting to die.

It is possible to form human relations without these "foundational" concepts. — schopenhauer1

Yes. What I am saying is that as long as we maintain a society based on money and property, the logic of our own conceptions will lead to our annihilation.

Eventually, either we will all be dead, or another way of forming social relations will come into being.

And here the philosophy begins. What might be the nature of those relations, and how might they be conceived? Hierarchy without property for example? is it possible?

Everything, surely, depends on who owns the robots? — iolo

In the short term, as long as we maintain the economic conception of ourselves, that is the crucial question. But eventually, I propose, it must inevitably become a meaningless question, for the reasons noted above.

One man's joke is another man's political agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Celticism

I can't see Scotland unifying with Eire in the near term. They would have to go via independence to join the EU.

IOW they don't have a potential partner already in the EU to lobby for them.

The Invisible Hand is a concept. It doesn't decide anything. It may be true that Capital tends towards greater production at cheaper cost, but this isn't, strictly speaking, a law by any means. — Maw

Gravity is a concept and doesn't decide anything. But things fall down.

Economics is how we conduct social relations. We do it with money. Money is a representation of property. Ownership is a relation we have made sacred. I would like folks as philosophers to look at this without providing instant fixes in the first place. If you look first, you will I think see that fixes based on shared ownership or UBI simply do not answer.

Labour is value; labour is virtue. This is the origin of economics; that a farmer works to improve the land and plant a crop. He invests his labour in the land and has to protect it until the harvest. Hence property.
And hence barter, trade, money. The tool-maker likewise invests his labour to produce the means of production, and hence capital. So the end of labour is the end of the foundation of the economy. But you think you can keep the functions of property and money when the foundation has gone. The Emperor has no clothes; money and property has no meaning or function any more. The working class is already dead.

But who cares — schopenhauer1

That is a great question. But it is not an economic question, because Economics is founded on enlightened self-interest. The idea is that nobody has to care because the invisible hand of economics, which is the social equivalent of natural selection, will manage things as if we cared.

So how "bad" is this non-work scenario? — schopenhauer1

Another great question, but again not an economic question. By and large, for most people and according to standard economic models, a non-work scenario is a non-eat scenario. Personally, I think that's quite bad. I understand that you rather welcome the apocalypse as the end of suffering, but again that is not an economic matter.

I am more addressing those who might wish to rebel against their imminent extinction. I wonder if I need to lay out why socialism is not a solution to all this?

https://www.lbcnews.co.uk/uk-news/one-in-every-200-people-england-now-homeless/

This is not an unfortunate mistake, nor is it a shortage of bricks.

Medical science progresses in leaps and bounds, but UK life expectancy is falling.

Replacing the NHS with American companies is not going to improve matters.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/28/the-dirty-war-on-the-national-health-service-review-john-pilger-documentary

Q. How does one get rid of the the proletariat when they are no longer an asset, and extermination camps are a bit notorious?
A. Let climate change take the blame. Just close the borders and turn up the heat.