OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
> It's my suspicion that with ensuing advancements of technology, > automation and robotics, traditional capitalism as it is currently > practiced will have to evolve... Capitalism, communism, Feudalism, mercantalism and every other economic system ever invented can be defined as: A system to allocate human labor, goods and services. Some of these systems have been efficient; others were inefficient. Some were just; others were unjust, and still others tyrannical. No economic system could exist until people achieved some level of agriculture and the ability to gather in villages and later towns and cities. Human labor is now losing value. Robots and intelligent computers are replacing human workers in many fields, including ones that people previously thought could never be done by machines. Within 20 to 100 years, human labor will be worthless. In the distant future, machines will supply all of the food we want. They will capable of supplying 10 times the food we want, or a thousand times. They will be capable of manufacturing a car for every driver, or 100,000 cars for every driver, or enough cars to cover the whole surface of Mars with automobiles in piles 100 cars high. Material scarcity and human labor allocation will become distant memories, the way waterborne infectious disease has in first world countries. The concept of "economic justice" will become meaningless. The distinction between capitalism and communism will be meaningless, like the difference between Protestants and Catholics is to an atheist. As this transition occurs, all economic systems will gradually collapse. This is already happening. When labor is worth nothing, you cannot predicate your economic system on it. With the Internet we have seen the cost of transferring information drop so close to zero it no longer matters. No one bothers to account for it. As that happened, people who made a living selling information that was difficult to access went out of business. It become like selling water by the river, as the Zen proverb has it. Some new economic system must emerge. It will not be capitalism or communism. No human institution lasts forever; when we have no need for these things, they will vanish as surely as Feudalism did, or slavery did in the first world. I am confident that something new will emerge. If we can devise these wonderful machines capable of fulfilling all of our material needs and desires, surely we can also devise some practical means to allocate the output of the machines so that everyone can have whatever they need, if not everything they desire. As Romney put it, even today, people feel they are "entitled to health care, to food, to housing." Naturally, they feel that way! Since we can have these things in abundance in the first world, people have every right to feel that way. In the future, everyone living in every part of the solar system will take it for granted that they have a birthright to healthcare, food, housing, education, energy, internet access and much else. These things will cost nothing. Virtually nothing; the per capita cost to supply food, health care and so on will be roughly what it costs us today to supply a house with clean, potable water in a first-world household. That's $335 per year average in the U.S. Keeping track of such trivial expenses would be a waste of time. Collecting taxes to pay for them would be a waste of time. In any case, you can't collect taxes when most people do not bother to work, or have not need to work. Cold fusion will play a large roll in making this transition possible. - Jed
