

Unemployment is not a disease - maxwell
http://www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/texts/raw-RICH.html

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jeremyw
Slight tangent. Greater automation and the necessities of life driving toward
a zero cost -- vs -- the ever bigger dreams of humanity, employing greater
labor / more minds. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify the two fantasies
against one another.

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maxwell
I think they're interrelated. Look at how the European colonization of the
Americas coincided with the Renaissance. They only happened because of a few
key technologies reaching a certain point of evolutionary maturity. You needed
the square rig, pintle-and-gudgeon rudder, compass, star charts, oil paint,
double entry accounting... (See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hukkfbevWM>)

We still have more problems to resolve (such as the finite nature of
terrestrial resources) before all undesirable but necessary tasks are
automated, and we can spend our lives entirely on art/science.

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maxharris
The gains in productivity that you get from automation should be pumped into
fields where pain points still exist, such as medical research.

With the infrastructure that's been built, we have wonderful tools that we can
use to learn how to extend human life. Just as we once moved from agriculture
to manufacturing we should move again now to massive efforts to advance and
practice medicine. In addition to being immoral, socialism (the article
proposes several guaranteed-income programs) is not a practical system for
getting the results needed to meet the challenges we face.

As I learn about cancer biology, I often wish that even more people would jump
in and try to figure things out. The field is full of incredibly tough
problems, and they are of paramount importance to virtually everyone: you're
going to get cancer if you live long enough.

You might think it's fantastic that millions of average folks should go and
get educations in the sciences, and perhaps it is. But socialism simply would
pull people in the exact opposite direction. (See some statistics on Saudi
Arabia if you want to see what free money does to a people.)

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asciilifeform
Is starvation a disease?

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onreact-com
"unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an
advanced technological society."

This is almost true. Everybody who wants to work should be able to do so, have
the right to do so. It's not needed for society as a whole that everybody has
to work (to survive) like today.

