Well, a lot of them don’t have jobs. Which is what happens when you don’t run a business very well.
But banks make a convenient populist target for idiots because they are big faceless corporations with lots of money and do things with it people don’t understand.
No. A print is just as good.
You bring up a good point. What about original works of art. Rare items usually placed in museums…
As a sort of artist myself, my intent has never been to make money off of it. I think most classical artists would agree that it’s more about expression, and they’d be more concerned with being able to share their art with many people rather than make a quick buck. but that’s all pointless.
Obviously there is some inherent value that these items have that go beyond money. Right?
So what if you’re part of this new society and you want a priceless painting… I would say… ‘No.’ it would honor Van Gogh more for this to be displayed publicly for anyone to see in a museum… why not keep it where it is.
What does this make me… a dictator? Or someone who made a reasonable choice.
So could art theft still be an issue… I guess so, but I’m not buying that this is some detrimental flaw with the system. I’m sure given time we could even recreate each paint stroke to give you an exact copy…
Isn’t it enough to know your family will always have everything they need and want, besides the few expensive jets and priceless paintings?
The hell it is!! The original enraptures me. It takes me into communion with Vincent’s soul. A print is just a pretty poster.
Yes, it makes you a dictator. Furthermore, it sounds like you just made a law. I thought you said this new society would function without laws.
I agree. Original works of art will always be favored, just for their status as a unique item. There may be infinite copies, but there is only one original - with the resultant expected effect on demand.
If he appropriates everything through sheer personal force and protects it with sheer personal firepower, he hasn’t made a law in the usual sense.
Probably waiting. It would probably willed to their child or grand child… and they could decide if they wanted to stay there. So yes this is a scarce resource, but nothing is exactly perfect or fair in our system either.
In a couple generations having lived under this system, whose to say people won’t change and be less materialistic.
Tough to organize it all? yes. Impossible? no. You just need the right mind to solve the problem. I’m not that guy 
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But this is basically what I keep hearing:
I want more than other people. I want to live beyond my needs in spite of starvation and disease in other parts of the world. I don’t care because it doesn’t effect me in my cozy little world. I don’t want to work without reward because I don’t care about other people and only me and my family and that’s how it should be. Capitalism is great because I can work hard all my life and never attain my dreams and never have everything I wanted. I can study hard and still not end up with the job I wanted. That’s what’s so great about capitalism. Every other type of system is going to rob me of my dreams of owning more than everyone else and rubbing their noses in it. Every other system makes me share even when I’m not sharing anything. it’s the idea that some other person can have the same things I can without working, which admittedly I wouldn’t do if i didn’t have to. If there was no capitalism I would just sit on my ass and contribute nothing, to protest the idea that I lived in a world where all needs were meant… and most wants were as well. That’s fucking stupid. Who cares that many violent crimes are associated with poverty. If there weren’t a lower class of white trash or African American ghettos I’d have nothing to feel better than.
Well that’s what I hear anyway… :rolleyes:
The good news is I wouldn’t be making the decisions.
The bad news committees of experts would probably make the same decision.
Similar to how we have congress make a law yes, but instead of politicians we have scientists, or in this case art experts.
So there would be laws after all.
How would these experts be chosen? How would their decisions be enforced?
You should go on to read (or at least skim) the rest of it. Wait until you get to the guts of it, where it describes how they intend to get rid of all government, and replace it with a gigantic computer that will make completely objective decisions that are the best interests of mankind.
I was agape.
LOL … the OP is very silly.
Scarcity is a fact. Wishful thinking about heretofore unimagined scientific advances won’t make it go away. Even if we had billions of robot slaves at our beck and call there would still be a finite amount of work they could do in a given time frame and we would have to decide whether they would spend their time doing THIS or doing THAT.
Ownership is a system for allocating distributed control over scarce resources. Instead of having a central authority make allocation decisions, we delegate that responsibility to individual members of society. When someone owns something that means they have the power to determine how it is used.
Money is a means by which responsibility for control is abstracted and exchanged. I have control over how I spend my time. I’d like to surrender some of that in exchange for control over a building I can live in. Money allows that transfer to occur.
If you’re going to get rid of money and ownership, you have to come up with an alternate mechanism for controlling the allocation of scarce resources. The communists tried doing it through a central planning agency and discovered that was a bad way to do it. Capitalism’s distributed solution turned out to be more efficient.
I have no idea what solution the OP is proposing. Wishing the problem away it seems … .
More technology won’t help. The more stuff we make, the more complicated things become … the more questions arise over who controls what. Small bands of hunter-gatherers can live by communally pooling their resources. They don’t have very much and the individual human-to-human interactions in small groups make it easier to guarantee fairness. But you can’t run a big, complicated, technological society off good will. There are just too many opportunities for selfish people (i.e. almost all of us) to screw-over strangers for our own benefit.
You apparently aren’t familiar with what they’ve been doing with AI.
Also we use some forms of AI everyday to handle problem solving, is it really so hard to believe that eventually we’ll be able to pose questions to an AI and receive a logical response back.
The point is to get rid of the bureaucracy usually involved with decision making. I’d put more faith in a computer to give me a logical and reasonable answer than I would a senator from Alabama.
I think you grossly underestimate the difficulties of making a real AI. Not to mention, it wouldn’t solve anything if you had an AI - you’re still subject to the criteria and metrics for assessing results that your AI has, which presumably would be human in origin. Or rather, they’d better be human in origin; if you leave it to chance you might get Bender.
I realize that American culture has A LOT invested in bastardizing the native American, but there are things we could learn from them. Sure, they weren’t saints, but no one is claiming they were. Saints are fictions of the church. They don’t exist. But they did live in greater harmony with nature than us, for instance. Their culture probably could’ve continued almost indefinitely without catastrophic collapse (barring something like an asteroid, of course); ours-- I would be surprised if it lasts another 100 years without drastic changes in how we treat our environment. And millions or billions could have to die to finally bring about those changes. A lot of these differences between our cultures are rooted in what people are referring to when they describe human “greed.” The Indian just didn’t have it.
The only way that this works if is the people who think it’s a good idea murder the billions of people who think it’s an awful idea. Afterwards, the scarcity problem would disappear for a while as they all lived off the material rewards of the slaughter. I can’t predict what the end result would be - either paradise, apocalypse, or something in between.
I think you may want to start a thread about this.
OTTOMH
Indians used slash and burn farming
Indians used buffalo falls, killing far more buffalo than they could eat.
IMO, Indians only lived in harmony with the environment because there were few of them. Their methods would have been highly environmentally destructive if they had our numbers.
I am. Their ideas are silly.
Even if we had AI’s capable of such a feat (which we don’t), it would make more sense to distribute the control of the economy across multiple AIs running different planning algorithms and use their success in allocating resources to dynamically determine how much control each one should get in the future. That way you don’t put all your eggs in one planning basket.
Which is exactly what we do right now with human planners. If you use the resources under your control particularly effectively you make a lot of money, allowing you to put more resources under your control.
Or maybe there were few of them because they lived in harmony with the environment.
What is fact is things are more profitable if we make them scarce. IE diamonds. Hmm a system in which there is inherent benefit from depriving people… nope sounds fine.
You assume that in the society I am trying to defend… we wouldn’t be able to do whatever we wanted with the things we owned? Ownership doesn’t necessarily dictate that you have to purchase a good to own it. You can be given that good, and it’s yours to own and do with as you like.
I wouldn’t disagree, but what I would say is people are willing to surrender a lot more than time… my problem is people who get exploited because of having no other option. Here… maybe it’s not so much the case, but in poorer countries it is.
Not giving up ownership really. I mean if I live in a house my entire life I might as well say I own that house. No one else is going to live there, and I say who comes in and what gets done to my house. Same can be said for the material goods… I own them, but I didn’t pay for them.
Central planning agency… yeah I know the soviets had things like a single uniform for people to wear, because they thought that was enough, but they didn’t exactly have a panel of people from the fashion industry making decisions either. The point is to have experts in every field make those types of decisions. But instead of profit their goal will be to improve the standard of living.
This has happened throughout history where a great mind will give away his knowledge, but today we’re so profit driven it’s hard to see the other rewards besides money. I again suggest you look at the vast amount of contributions the open source community has given us.
First, it’s not exactly MY proposal. Credit goes to ZM. If anything I’ve probably embarrassed them with my poor defense.
More technology will help. The idea is not to make MORE, but good durable goods. The system we have now is the system of MORE and cheap knock offs with flimsy designs.
Who controls what? We control our lives. Where we live. What we own. We can choose to be part of the problem solving groups or engineers, and receive the best education possible, … Pretty sure we decide everything in this system.
“There are just too many opportunities for selfish people (i.e. almost all of us) to screw-over strangers for our own benefit.”
I don’t agree with almost all of us… again I think that’s ego-centric. What i do agree with is that selfishness and the desire to want more than other people and to feel superior to other people is what is holding us back right now.
What if I want to sell it, and retain the value in a form I can use easily later?
Slash and burn farming and buffalo falls are in harmony with the environment?
Anyhoo, if you want to continue to debate this, please start a thread.
They, as in ZM, hasn’t done anything with AI as far as I know. I don’t think they stand to be in control of that anyway, they would have experts handle it.
You talk about algorithms being calculated by machines… and you talk about a human does that work instead… wait wait… a human does ALL of it? I am pretty sure they have number crunching computers to do most of the work for them.
Lets fact it… every facet of our life now involves some form of computer interfacing.
Whether it is looking up directions, solving a difficult algorithm, or diagnosing a patient. Computers are used in pretty much all fields as problem solving devices. Even fast food… and they still can’t get the order right.
Humans are great at invention, but horrible when it comes to mundane tasks and being an encyclopedia. Mistakes can be made and even doctors are still going to have to consult a computer before making a final diagnosis.