Mind's Eye Re: thought experiments

Ahhhh robot heaven is my ideal.

It gets rid of money as nobody would need to barter goods or services to survive, it would mean that humans can spend more time growing and learning, and can you imagine the various works of art, in all media?

Now of course the thing to consider is the transitional period, and I guess this is Archy's main thrust.  Our history shows us that such transitional periods are fraught with violence and upheaval, I suspect a move to robotic heaven would be little different.

So we have robots a plenty and much work going on in robotics.  I suspect the next thing we'll have to sort is robots that make and repair robots.

Should we concentrate then on food and water production and distribution?  Why yes I think we should.


Get that done and then nobody has to pay for food or water, ahhh now we are getting somewhere.  A world full of thinkers and artists!

Energy next?
On Wednesday, 19 September 2012 22:56:36 UTC+1, archytas wrote:

Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate
the nature of things. Thought experimenting often takes place when the
method of variation is employed in entertaining imaginative
suppositions. They are used for diverse reasons in a variety of areas,
including economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, and physics.
Most often thought experiments are communicated in narrative form,
sometimes through media like a diagram. Thought experiments should be
distinguished from thinking about experiments, from merely imagining
any experiments to be conducted outside the imagination, and from
psychological experiments with thoughts. They should also be
distinguished from counterfactual reasoning in general, as they seem
to require an experimental element.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/

One I like is the notion of robot heaven.  It's easy enough to imagine
a time when machines grow our food, build our shelter and do our
work.  The interesting stuff comes in thinking what this would mean
for wealth distribution and the nature of society.  What work would be
left to do?  One can also wonder what place any of our work ethics
would have in such a society.  There may be some deconstructive effect
on just what current work ideologies are in place for.

One of the great improvements technology brought to my life is more or
less never having to go into a bank.  The only real innovations in
banking are the ATM and electronic banking.  This kind of technology
and similar in agriculture and industry fundamentally reduce the
amount of human effort to grow and make what we need.  We are in
partial state of robot heaven.

Our ideologies are not up to speed.  Real unemployment is massive and
education does little to provide job skills.  We are sold life-styles
and products by insane advertising.  Job creation seems to be in
perverse areas like financial services or bringing back attended gas-
pumps.  With more efficient production we should be able to afford a
bigger social sector and I can't for the life of me understand why we
allow competition through crap wages and conditions.

A great deal of what we pay for could be available more or less free.
Educational content and utility banking are examples - these are areas
that could be ratinalised like agriculture and manufacturing.
Millions of jobs would go.  We should be asking why jobs are so
central to out thinking on wealth distribution and how we might
encourage work without the rat race.

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