How about the idea of the "paradox of work" where people are generally annoyed by being at work and wish they did not have to actually be at a certain place at a certain time, but at the same time, are not happy listlessly luxuriating at their home, doing passive activities alone for extended periods of time. In other words, work provides avenues of concentrating one's attention and socializing, things humans crave due to our social nature and big brains that need to be occupied. — schopenhauer1

I agree.

So what would a post-work society be like? — schopenhauer1

Probably like this:

Is it one where we are isolated, listless, and depressed due to lack of social interaction — schopenhauer1

>:O

What is it saying about the human condition if we must choose between two non-ideal states? To be "managed", told what to do, stressed out, and/or bored with repetition at a job setting, or be bored with a long stretch of leisure time?

Another comment I have is that, you seem to be assuming that everyone else is working and you are not, like unemployment. But what if EVERYONE did not need to go to work. That means more people to form social interactions with for all sorts of reasons.

To be "managed", told what to do, stressed out, and/or bored with repetition at a job setting, or be bored with a long stretch of leisure time? — schopenhauer1

Well that's not necessarily the case. You could be self-employed and working in something you like or care about for example. I think work is a necessity of life, and therefore I cannot even begin to imagine a world without work. Such a world would be hell for me.

Well that's not necessarily the case. You could be self-employed and working in something you like or care about for example. I think work is a necessity of life, and therefore I cannot even begin to imagine a world without work. Such a world would be hell for me. — Agustino

If you are self-employed and love what you do, could you do it without being paid for it? By work here, I mean getting a wage for labor. If that was taken care of, you can potentially do whatever you like doing and give it away or even sell it, if money still worked that way. But it would not be done out of necessity, simply out of the enjoyment of doing it.

If you are self-employed and love what you do, could you do it without being paid for it? By work here, I mean getting a wage for labor. If that was taken care of, you can potentially do whatever you like doing and give it away or even sell it, if money still worked that way. But it would not be done out of necessity, simply out of the enjoyment of doing it. — schopenhauer1

Getting paid is part of what I like about working so no, I would definitely not do it without being paid (well depends who is asking for it without payment in practice). You do something meaningful and valuable for others, and they use a scarce resource that they care about, money, in order to show their appreciation. I have found that customers that I do small and cheap work for never appreciate it and never make much use of it themselves. However, customers that I can charge more end up actually appreciating the work, and coming back for more. So it's not that I need the money. I would charge even if I was a billionaire and doing this for pleasure, because charging is part of what makes it work. I have more money than I require for my needs (which are not many at all) so I never truly did it just for the money. My earnings are greater than my costs by quite a bit, and I don't spend on what other folks would like luxuries, and other non-essentials.

As I said, I can't imagine a world without work - without doing something valuable in exchange for other things from others.

He missed a lot of fundamentals as though he's just a hack who has no clue what he's writing about. Utopia tends to be a pretty foreign idea to people living in civilization who often have no clue about how anything remotely like a Utopia actually functions. On the communes I've lived on most people required at least three years just to figure out how group decision making functions because they've been taught all their lives politics is just about fighting for whatever you believe in.

On the communes I've lived on most people required at least three years just to figure out how group decision making functions because they've been taught all their lives politics is just about fighting for whatever you believe in. — wuliheron

So do you take it that organised society, both today and 2000 years ago is "bad", and we should be living and working in communes?

So do you take it that organised society, both today and 2000 years ago is "bad", and we should be living and working in communes? — Agustino

No, not communes per se, but that what is coming is more like Star Trek where if you want something you just walk up to the nearest replicator and ask for it. What even communes lack is the systems logic to organize more effectively and that is about to invade every commercial electronic device on the market. For example, you can already buy a cellphone that doubles as a lie detector and, soon enough, they'll have the intelligence and social capacity of a God. The computer on Star Trek had no real mind, but think more of Mr Data with true compassion and wisdom or Yoda from Star Wars. It can become whatever you need it to be in order to grow as a human being.

But then it could still be a choice and not a necessity to exchange goods. But to wish the world had more scarcity just so you can get the pleasure of exchanging your goods for money is a bit odd.

But then it could still be a choice and not a necessity to exchange goods. But to wish the world had more scarcity just so you can get the pleasure of exchanging your goods for money is a bit odd. — schopenhauer1

I cannot imagine a world where it's not a necessity to exchange goods.

The economy is already full tilt towards an information economy where resources are being distributed more according to need and money is slowly giving way to information as the currency of the day. Think of it like all the TV and internet advertisements and data mining, but what is coming is more of an economy of systems logic where its impossible not to participate. In the meantime, flat out starving to death has been cut in half and there are concerted efforts to improve all the basic services around the world including internet access which now reaches half the population.

Maybe but you forget that it's only very small parts of the world where this is happening. Most of the world lives and will continue to live very differently from an information age for many hundreds of years.

Maybe but you forget that it's only very small parts of the world where this is happening. Most of the world lives and will continue to live very differently from an information age for many hundreds of years. — Agustino

No, it is rapidly expanding and showing no signs of stopping. Like I said, starvation has been cut in half the number of people dedicated to changing the world forever has rapidly grown within the last century. Google has even installed free wi-fi in places like New Zealand where the system pays for itself through advertising. NYC is installing two wi-fi systems, one is for free public access and the other for paying customers. Theoretically, using next generation terahertz technology you can flood an entire city with infrared that will penetrate walls and provide terabits per second which is enough to run a Star Trek holodeck.

Progress is always two steps forward and one back and the ecology itself is collapsing as we speak but, other than the current crisis in making the transition, things have never looked better. Its the ancient Chinese blessing and curse of "May you live in interesting times" and a Theory of Everything that ushers in the next scientific revolution could be exactly what we need to survive as a species and rise above our problems. Its what Rainbow Warriors often call "Childhood's End" or the end of civilized puberty and transition into adulthood, which is always rough and sometimes you have to wonder how teens survive.

It is rapidly expanding in the developed world. But go to Africa and see what things are like over there :P Give it 100 years, and still African people are going to be living very differently in Africa than the Americans will be living in the US. What I've been learning more and more is that we don't live in ONE world - rather there are multiple worlds co-existing side by side and on the same planet.

It is rapidly expanding in the developed world. But go to Africa and see what things are like over there :P Give it 100 years, and still African people are going to be living very differently in Africa than the Americans will be living in the US. What I've been learning more and more is that we don't live in ONE world - rather there are multiple worlds co-existing side by side and on the same planet. — Agustino

The internet is expanding in parts of Africa with Nigerian scammers becoming infamous. Progress there isn't as fast, but progress it is. Solar powered drones that provide internet are becoming a reality and cellphones are spreading even in the third world at a phenomenal rate. Some third world countries we no longer even think of as third world, like China, where progress has spread new services to a huge percentage of the world. Some of the new third world technology coming out include cheap solar cells, printers that print an entire house in hours complete with all the plumbing and wiring, and even genetically engineered plants that provide vitamins and medicines. A ten million dollar prize awaits whoever can devise the first Star Trek Tricorder for medical uses in the third world.

Its a real mishmash at this point and, for example, people have figured out how to make cheap electricity using fresh water rivers and the oceans they dump into as a battery, but we're still waiting for the technology to mature before building more than pilot plants. This century will see an end to destitute poverty which is the goal of Gramene Bank and so many others with the capital to make it happen. War, pollution, and exploitation are next on the agenda. In fact, war is still responsible for most of the starvation left in the world.

Yes but get away from these abstractions. Take Eastern European countries. Almost everyone has a cell phone here. Yet they know shit about cell phones. The granny can dial a number on it, that's all. They all have computers - all they know to do on them is play games. Yes, technology exists in those places, but people don't know how to use it properly. That's why they pay people like me. Furthermore, most people in third world countries don't know how to think. They don't know how to go about solving problems. You can give them all the technology in the world, you can sell it to them, which is what big multinational corporations like Microsoft, Google, etc. are doing. But this isn't going to improve their thinking. It's not going to make them more capable people. And the very interesting thing is that technology has become a way to keep them dumb. If I try to teach some of my clients a little about how to think about their software, how to use it, and so forth they get pissed off. They just want something that's VERY easy to use and that works for whatever they have in mind. They don't care how it works, why it works, why it stops working and so forth. Technology is making them want to be stupid and ignorant - they have less time for knowledge and more time for using easy-to-use technology that's already made for them.

So I'm not sure that the developing world will progress at the same rate. Sure they'll have technology that they know nothing or almost nothing about. Technology that they can't operate without paying others to do it for them.

I've been to relatively well-to-do small business where they keep their warehouses on paper, by hand. And the guy in charge of the warehouse has a fit whenever they are approached by someone like me - even though their boss sent me - so that I can understand their warehouse and build them a computer database. They don't even want to have any such thing. Only their boss wants, and they do anything and everything to oppose it. And it makes sense - from their point of view, their boss depended on them to know what materials are in stock, what has to be ordered, and so forth. Now that the technology can handle it, it's a disaster. It means their boss no longer depends on them. All they will be doing is introducing data in a computer which they are scared about because they don't know how to do. No more boss coming around to visit and for a chat - he just checks the computer.

The first study of the use of tablets by school children has established that they can be used to teach mathematics in particular. They use a collaborative, yet, competitive format where the kids can compete in groups for the solution to a problem and switch to collaborating on the fly. Its all new technology and so powerful that nobody has figured out all the productive uses it can be put to, but that's just a question of time. Like American culture, everyone is becoming more materialistic, but that's just how you get your foot in the door to figure out how to help people help themselves. There are problems similar to the Cargo Cults of New Zealand as well that have to be addressed, but people are complex. Once we have the systems logic it will make their collective behavior all that much more predictable and already there a few popular websites such as Google that have been organized specifically to explore the systems logic and people's interactions. What's coming next is the AI to bring all the pieces together.

The first study of the use of tablets by school children has established that they can be used to teach mathematics in particular — wuliheron

Probably in the US, where kids are used to such devices. If you come to my country, if a school was to give such devices to children, the parents would be outraged! How can kids have access to such devices at a young age! That's bad for them... and so forth. The kids themselves would most likely be unwilling to collaborate. The truth is that the world is much more broken up. We don't have only one world, as I said, but rather multiple, different worlds, living side by side. Your hope of a technological world is true only for a small part of the world. Only that world will be truly technological.

Probably in the US, where kids are used to such devices. If you come to my country, if a school was to give such devices to children, the parents would be outraged! How can kids have access to such devices at a young age! That's bad for them... and so forth. The kids themselves would most likely be unwilling to collaborate. The truth is that the world is much more broken up. We don't have only one world, as I said, but rather multiple, different worlds, living side by side. — Agustino

In Africa they've already done experiments with teaching kids how to program. They were successful, but the kids had no real use for the knowledge with the question becoming how to put skills they can be taught to productive use. Jimmy Carter had a mildly controversial program where he sent basketball equipment to Masai tribesmen. It was one of those cheap investments because if just one of them was really good they could play professionally and support an entire village which, it turns out, is exactly what they did. The internet is now used extensively to provide micro-loans where people can check out the individual themselves and decide if they want to loan them money for a goat or whatever.

I know its hard to believe all of humanity are not just greedy scumbags and lazy bums, but its true.

I know its hard to believe all of humanity are not just greedy scumbags and lazy bums, but its true. — wuliheron

I don't disagree with this, but the fact is that most are in fact greedy scumbags and lazy bums. The only question is can we help educate them to be different, better human beings, and most importantly how.

I don't disagree with this, but the fact is that most are in fact greedy scumbags and lazy bums. The only question is can we help educate them to be different, better human beings, and most importantly how. — Agustino

People are idiots and in groups their insanity can know-no bounds, but that doesn't mean we cannot learn more about both our individual and collective behavior and take appropriate steps. In this century psychology and sociology and other fields have been as much art forms as sciences, but all that is about to change. The human mind is not nearly as mysterious and complex as many would have us believe. Its just the knowledge and technology has not yet been developed and, soon enough, people will become transparent in front of the whole world watching on camera with computers explaining whether they are lying, telling the truth, joking, or just flat out insane.

You can run, but you cannot hide from your own truth and technology is rapidly catching up.

Its just the knowledge and technology has not yet been developed and, soon enough, people will become transparent in front of the whole world watching on camera with computers explaining whether they are lying, telling the truth, joking, or just flat out insane. — wuliheron

There is a certain arrogance in this. As a developer of technology myself I am acutely aware of how "fragile" all technology is - some technology can take a life of its own and adapt and develop by itself, but the process is prone to errors - errors that our human mind, at points, struggles to track. I remember in my university days studying and doing research in structural dynamics and chaos theory. The principles I learned apply. The more perfect something is, the more imperfection sensitive it is. In fact, to be perfect is not only an advantage, but a great disadvantage as well. Perfection is equivalent to sensitivity. It is true that a shell structure in the perfect form, say a dome, is impossibly strong if there are no imperfections. But the smallest imperfection has a HUGE negative effect in its load distribution/carrying potential. This is true for technology as well - and that very small imperfection seems to be impossible to eradicate. Many structures today are purposefully built imperfectly - in order to avoid the sensitivity that would be there if they were perfect. They are more robust in this manner. I should add here that most of chaos theory is just an investigation in the tractability of imperfections, with the result that imperfections are not tractable. Very similar but not identical initial conditions lead to such different results that no pattern or relationship can be discerned. We have to operate in this uncertain world, and technology is only an unreliable crane that we have to make use of to facilitate our navigation.

Furthermore, the problem of technology is that people trust it too much, and the truth is technology, more often than not, is wrong. People do everything using technology but because they don't understand it, they don't understand how and when it can go wrong. A society governed by technology which COULD tell whether people are lying, telling the truth, joking - even supposing that the accuracy is 100% (which will never actually be the case) - would be rejected by men VIOLENTLY. Most people have some common interest in being able to lie and get away with it. Most people do not want to get rid of lies.

You should not discard the fact that this world is headed down the rabbit hole anyway, sooner or later. The entire laws of physics guarantee the dissolution of the world. The second law of thermodynamics guarantees that processes are irreversible once a certain activation energy is achieved. Imagine rolling a boulder from a small valley up a small hill. At the top of that small hill, there is a longer and steeper slope downward. The small hill that has to be overcome before the ball can roll down is the activation energy. Once that is in there, the ball will roll downhill and the whole process will be irreversible.

We are negentropic processes, all life is. We're decreasing our own entropy at a slower rater than we're increasing the entropy of our environment, leading to a net gain in entropy. A negentropic process is stable... until the necessary activation energy is met, and then the way downhill is swift and fast. Life is an incredibly brilliant and yet sensitive occurrence in the Universe. Technology itself is but a part of this entropic universe, a means of the Universe of guaranteeing its own entropification.

The very structure of the world guarantees that not much will change. Technology or not - people will remain people. And the wisdom of Jesus remains true here: this world will crumble - it's inevitable. The wages of sin are death, and the whole world, with Adam, has sinned. Once the entropic process has begone, the Universe was cursed to vanish. The irony is that regardless of what is done, the odds are stacked against life, against order, against negentropy, and for chaos and destruction. It's not that one person, or one civilisation or one group of men cannot do good for the world, cannot be virtuous. It's that the balance will never be in their favour. The odds are stacked against us.

But that's not to take away from the greatness of man. The greatness of man is precisely that he does not yield, and does not surrender, even if defeat is guaranteed and he knows that it is guaranteed. That is a triumph of the spirit, and it is the only thing that actually belongs to man.

The second law of thermodynamics has been violated in the laboratory using a micron sized silica bead. You can't use the energy for any useful purpose, but you can watch Humpty Dumpty put himself back together again. Time is not what you think it is because going down the rabbit hole its a recursion in the law of identity. What is organic and technology becomes a matter of perspective with biologists merely using a list of pragmatic criteria for making the distinction. That life just keeps getting interesting is just a taste of what is to come because yin-yang dynamics means everything is metaphorical which is a completely different animal. Sort of Star Trek meets Star Wars with a lot of existentialist humor thrown in including what I like to call "adult potty humor" because mother nature's sense of humor is that of a mindless infant.

Hence, the Chinese blessing and curse of, "May you live in interesting times". Among other things people are now investigating the possibly of creating energy in one location and teleporting to another as information and converting it back again so your refridgerator doesn't need an electrical cord or power supply. That's just the beginning because soon enough the truth that time is malleable and a self-organizing system will come out.

The second law of thermodynamics has been violated in the laboratory using a micron sized silica bead. — wuliheron

No the second law of of thermodynamics has never been violated. The silica bead experiment proves something that we already know - that the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law, meaning that it doesn't apply to individual instances. Sure - you can have an individual object/system/person violate the second law of thermodynamics. But overall entropy will increase. That part is unavoidable. Sure you can decrease the entropy of a system - but at what cost? Take dissolving a piece of sugar in coffee. The point isn't that you can't reverse the process. It's that if you DO reverse the process, you will use a lot more energy than was required to lead to the process. If you were to reverse the whole of history, you would have to use more energy than ever existed - hence impossible. Remember the analogy of the ball in the valley, followed by the small hill, followed by a much longer and steeper slope downwards. To activate the process - in this case to take the piece of sugar and put it in the cup of coffee - takes little energy, just overcoming the small hill. To reverse the process though, which is to push the ball up the much larger hill down which it fell, takes infinitely more energy.

Reversing the process of old age for example isn't impossible. It's just that it takes more energy to do than it is to give life to a new child. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't state that such things are impossible - reversing processes - but rather that the odds are stacked against reversing processes, and given sufficient time, they will not be reversed.

The idea of the post-work Star Trek-like society is fantasy, fiction, imaginary, and unreal. Where is my replicator, I want to know?

What's in it for them, anyway? Are "they" really going to produce the food, clean water, clothing, shelter, heat, medical care, education, and so on that I-you-we require to live? For nothing? Just come and get it? Why would they? If you do not have a tangible and valuable exchange good to give them (cash, labor, gold bricks, etc.) why the hell will they support you?

There are still substantial costs in producing food, clothing shelter, clean water, heat, medical care, education, entertainment, and so on. Who is going to pay for it? Yes, I understand that robots can do all sorts of things. A lot of what people do for work and home maintenance can be robotized, computerized, and digitized--but not for nothing.

The bigger revolution (not the robotization part) hasn't happened yet, and doesn't appear to in the offing any time soon: the post-ownership world.

You may like your existence and I may like mine. But so far we have been been maintained in our existence because either we, or someone on our behalf, paid for our upkeep. Our existences were not considered so-worthwhile-in-themselves that we were declared national treasures worthy of free-support for life.

Well, you object... 7 billion people; that's too many to get rid of. WE outnumber THEM. THEY will keep supporting us forever.

I wouldn't count on it. We may be numerous, but we are not too numerous to be gotten rid of, one way or another. My guess is that the elite already sees no reason to keep 7 billion people on board, and would just as soon there be a major die-off. It can be arranged, rest assured.

There is no "statistical" explanation or any other for time flowing backwards. That the energy can't be used for productive purposes merely means that energy is causal, but information is not which means we can literally watch Humpty Dumpty put himself back together again. Finnish researchers established the same when they produced the first autonomous version of Maxwell's Demon that sorted electrons according to their charges without expending any energy in the process. Its as if they waved a magic wand over an otherwise quite plain copper transistor empowering it to convince electrons to work out their differences and become more productive but, instead of violating causality, what it shows is that information itself is now bound by causality and entropy can decrease because information can be transformed into energy just as mass can be transformed into energy.

What it means is we can possibly learn a great deal including what the immediate future may hold without violating causality in any way whatsoever. The more critical issue than size, in my opinion, is how humble any contents are relative to the observer and the context. It means the HUP needs to be rewritten to produce a theory of everything and thermodynamics can be better expressed as a systems logic that can reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity.

If you want a replicator you can buy the first home commercial 3D printers. Its just a start, but there are already a dozen different 3D printers that will print an entire house in a matter of hours, some complete with all the wiring and plumbing. A ten million dollar prize awaits the first star trek tricorder and only a fool argues that star trek never inspired any real technology. Reality might be more complex than TV, but eventually it often catches up.

False. The Finnish researchers's device and Maxwell's Demon Reverse heat flow in agreement with the second law of thermodynamics by increasing their own temperature in order to do it - they expend energy to reverse the flow which is what i've been telling you all along. Information is physical - information obeys the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy increases in information as well. The amount of bogus and false information outnumbers the amount of true information, and the ratio keeps increasing. Again, the law has never been broken, it's considered the most certain law in physics, more certain than quantum physics and relativity put together.

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/127