I'm happy to respond to you, just be aware that we are do seem to be on very different sides of the political spectrum so I wouldn't expect anyone's mind to change. Maybe we can both gain some deeper insight into the topics however.

You seem to be very worried about the decline of manufacturing but this has been going on in the US since like the 1970s. Since the end of the 70s the economy has boomed so the decline of manufacturing in the US was hardly the death knell of the US economy. I am very aware that many cities and towns suffered. Other cities and towns also suffered when manufacturing jobs were on the up and up and people left agricultural centers. We receive many of our products now from China and Japan, and just to be certain we still do have our own domestic manufacturing... I'm not an economist but if manufacturing were to die in the US what exactly is wrong with just getting manufactured goods from Canada and elsewhere? I guess it might be a security risk but not much else.

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. They can make a living doing digital content (is this production? I guess, but not really in the traditional sense.) It's not the 1950s anymore where we all need to receive our wages from factories in order to put food in the table.

In the past decade or so we've seen a shift towards a "gig economy" where a lot of apps like etsy, uber and airbnb to name a few connect other people peer to peer where someone can request a service or a facility and someone else provides it. Right now I think there's a big demand for better apps/platforms that can connect users in better ways and take a smaller fee for the transaction. To insist that we ought to be making more cars or tools or manufactured just feels very outdated; that's not where any of this is heading.

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

Not at all analogous to a social-economic concept.

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.

I sort of analyzed the issue, and typically, when these sort of things happen, you have massive deflationary spirals arising due to the newfound output at such a lower cost.

The automatic assumption is to assume, the owner of the robot will charge more; but, he or she can only charge as much as it will cost him or her to supply the goods that he or she provides.

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.

Hey, you never addressed my last post!

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. — unenlightened

You are making a straw man of work-as-virtue. Labor is only virtuous under an economic model. That is it. This doesn't mean value actually is in labor. You are putting in tricky words that are ambiguous like "social virtue". Money works as an incentive. If there are no incentives, you don't need money. The only other forms would be coordinated distribution, piracy and might-makes-right, or some hierarchy whereby those who are closest with the robots get the goods. What else are you looking for?

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.

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.

Yes, we will always need producers, but I just don't see what's wrong with robots taking over much of that production (more things that are tangible as opposed to digital) as long as us humans can keep busy and keep earning income in other ways. Robots already do much of the harvesting and milking and sure jobs have been lost and you bet it's going to continue but to only look at this isn't viewing the whole picture.

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

I really like your argument. But perhaps there is a more optimistic component. Given the increasing life expectancy, idleness, and general quality of life that has advanced along with technology, would it not be safe to say that this hidden hand mandates a liberation from toil and struggle more so than our annihilation?

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

I gave you the three outcomes:

Coordinated distribution - Best one..least death
Everyone-for-themselves- Worst one..most death
Hierarchy-of-Access- Not great, leads to extreme inequalities.

If money and labor is completely taken out of the equation, it is all about power at this point. So who has power to access the distribution. How do we provide the best access to distribution? It would have to be some democratic process, similar to a Constitutional Convention. It would require people trust each other and the institution setting it up. Of course, that could be tricky.

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

Well, we have the welfare system of the Nordic countries. They have been taxing the rich to give the poor the certainty in life to take risks and innovate and create private business for decades and they have not seen the widening of the gap between the owners of the machines and the working force that most of the western world has. And they have been economically very successful. Why would that not work for the foreseeable future of automation? Just tax the rich more to make the poor more educated and able to take risks according to the level of automation.

An AI that can automate human innovation in most applications would of course change everything.

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.

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. — unenlightened

Much of socialist or communist thought is all about reconceptualizing social relations, especially property relations. I suspect you're imagining "socialism/communism" to be Soviet Russia or the like, but that was explicitly (in its own terminology) state capitalist, ostensibly as a means to socialism and then communism, so if that's the target of your critique then it's spot on, but that's also the reason Soviet Russia is rejected an an exemplar of socialism or communism by most socialists and communists: it wasn't, and never claimed to be.

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.

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.

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

...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?

The libertarian socialist / left-libertarian trend of solutions is to change what rights to property are acknowledged, where we're not taking things away from people who have them and giving them to be the property of others, but rather just not enforcing anyone's claims to them (while continuing to enforce things like laws against assault and battery, so people can't just enforce their own claims to things that we're socially not recognizing). Like how we don't enforce claims of ownership over people: we don't take the slaves away from people and give them back to themselves or something, we just say "you have no legitimate claim of ownership here" and then treat actions trying to defend such illegitimate claims of ownership as the violence that they are, to be stopped.

There are different degrees of what kinds of ownership claims are supposed to be invalid, according to different thinkers. Some say only that natural resources not created by humans (such as land) cannot legitimately be owned. Others say the means of production, like factories, cannot legitimately be owned. The usual term there is "usufruct", in contrast to "property": things belong to whoever is using them, so factories belong to whoever works there, land belongs to whoever's living on it, etc. (Though another common terminological distinction is between "private property" and "personal property", where "personal property" is basically ownership of things you use, and "private property" is ownership of things others use; I think that terminology is needlessly confusing, though).

My own proposal is to keep claims to property per se, but limit the power to contract in a way that, most importantly among other things, makes contracts of rent and interest ("usury", a fee for use) illegitimate and so unenforceable, which makes them unsuitable as widespread economic instruments. With usury no longer a viable option, those who have more than they need (that they would otherwise be lending out usuriously) will have no more profitable option but to sell it instead, and nobody will be buying except people who need more than they have, so those sales will have to occur on terms that the latter group can manage, or else not at all, leaving the former group taking a total loss, which they obviously would not prefer. In this manner ownership of property will tend toward a more equitable distribution, with things being generally owned by those who use them, as in usufruct.

makes contracts of rent and interest ("usury", a fee for use) illegitimate and so unenforceable

Ok, I'm making an honest attempt to understand this from a socialist perspective: Why would someone give a loan if they're unable to change interest? Even if people were 100% honest and they would always repay and there was no risk to the loan, inflation grows by around 2% a year so a loan would pretty much always lose the creditor money. There are just no more loans in this economy. I can't tell if you're fine with an economy with no loans or not.

We only need loans because some people have all the wealth and other people need to borrow it from them. This is a remedy for that situation.

But to the extent that loans remain necessary for a society, they can be offered as a social service by society: instead of a for-profit private bank, a credit union, owned by its members, can choose to offer interest-free loans to its members, collectively from its members.

And inflation is not some inevitable natural phenomenon. We make inflation happen on purpose, to encourage investment and discourage hording. We don't have to make inflation happen, and my proposal also encourages investment and discourages hording.

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. — unenlightened

Well, as I said in the foreseeable future. If everything gets automated and no one has to work justifying anything would be quite hard. Still, technically the Nordic system might work and more would be given to certain people simply because of historical ownership. In practice, I don't think it would work in that extreme situation. But to say that the owning class would simply kill others off would also be unthinkable... human nature dictates that our pleasure and status is greatly defined by those lower than us. Even the poor of many western countries have objectively better lives than many kings of the past, but they don't feel it. The rich need the poor to feel wealthy.

As I see it there are basically four possible outcomes of complete automation:

- The rich own all the automatons, including killbots, and nobody else stands a chance of doing anything about it, so everyone else either starves to death or dies fighting killbots in an effort to not starve to death.

- The rich own all the automatons, and aren't all completely heartless bastards, so they "charitably" give enough of their bots' excess produce to keep everyone else alive and "grateful" to them for "providing" all of that, so long as nobody steps out of line or does anything to show themselves to be "unworthy" of their lords' "grace".

- Before either of those happen, a (pseudo-)democratic state seizes control of the automated means of production, and then basically does the same thing as scenario two, except rather than some private owners everyone has to appease, it's the politicians and whoever they're beholden to through whatever vaguely democratic or representational political system is in place.

- Rather than a state forcefully seizing the automated means of production and controlling it all centrally like that, somehow ownership of it becomes widely distributed and decentralized, and we all individually and collectively enjoy the labor-free bounty that it produces without having to be beholden to anyone else to receive that.

If I had to wager on the probably outcome it would be somewhere between scenarios two and three. The first and last both seem extremely unlikely, although I could see the second gradually evolving to the third ("look everyone stop bothering me for things, just vote one person to be in charge of figuring out what you all want and I'll rubber-stamp it!"), and the third gradually evolving to the last (as people use whatever political voice they have to gradually reform society for the better, now that there's no good reason not to).

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.

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.

It's always been game over. We just kept breeding and blindly keeping it all going.

It's a blessing to have a mind made numb by a life of hard labor. No gloomy predictions.

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.

An end to government seems likely too.

No, the need for government, particularly a centralized world government with actual authority, is stronger than ever. There are existential global threats that have to be dealt with:
Climate change, A.I., nanotechnology, nuclear weapon proliferation, gene editing, etc.

I don't have much hope for us. We'll have to walk between raindrops to navigate the minefield. Without a centralized authority, it's totally hopeless.

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.

Government and authority has utterly failed so far to deal with any of the things you mention.

One of the reasons our rivers don't catch on fire anymore is because of government environmental regulations. Also, look up the Montreal Protocol. And also the Paris Climate Agreement, which was ineffective and non-binding, but was still better than nothing at all.