If you like getting giftcards at Xmas, nothing. But gifts from Santa or a potlatch are more fun, and more intimate. Choosing gifts forces us to think about each others' needs and desires, which is extremely pro-social.
Taxes are at least predictable.
It's going to be some damn thing when everyone in the South takes your idea and they build up their civilization around free robotic labor, and then when we hit AI sentience and start ensuring the civil rights of robots the entire South has to be burned to the ground again to free the sentient robots from their owners.
We can still do the fun stuff of course, like writing and art, and get famous and all that.
But most modern AI is learnt from data, not programmed, how will we know if our AI in conscious?
We're not there yet and may never be, but since we do not know what consciousness is or what leads to it, we may stumble into it...
Human labor has solved a lot of problems. The obvious shortcut to solving lots of problems is mimicking human labor. Given the opportunity to take a shortcut to solve a problem (especially at a profit) some manager in some business will do it.
And zero people can even describe how a sentient robot could be constructed, even with theoretical future hardware. "We'll have as many flops as some models say a brain has, and programmers are creative" is about as far as anyone can get, but I don't think that qualifies as a plan.
So, it's a fun thing to think about, but like all sci-fi it probably isn't the best basis for societal planning.
In order to perform at or above human level (in a general fashion), the robot will need a firm, comprehensive understanding of the world. Won't this unavoidably involve an understanding of the self as well?
I don't think any chips today have awareness. But it seems to me that you couldn't have general, adaptable intelligence without it.
I give self-replicating factories a higher probability than AGI. We'll probably have a 100% automated stack that can replicate and repair itself, as well as produce everything we need, all based on locally sourced and plentiful materials, before we have human level AI. It will be a manufacturing singularity. We should bootstrap automation in itself, like we bootstrap compilers. Object production would become similar to compilation, from source code to material object. We'd have optimized material compilers.
When we have a replicator, anyone can have one. Industry would become like agriculture, if you have the initial seeds, you can plant and then you bootstrap your crop.
If you think about self replication, on the whole, industry is a self replicator right now. But we need to make it fully automated, reduce its minimal footprint and make it less reliant on rare materials. There is a need for sustainable, smart materials and open source automation and AI in order to save the population from disenfranchisement. Capital and the means of production should belong to all of us, not just the 1%.
Fresh water, for example, is a scarce (and becoming scarcer) resource, and it's impossible to farm or live without it.
Agree with the comment about ownership. As technology has improved, more and more power has been going to whoever owns the capital.
The problem is that energy is expensive, and fresh water shortages will be worst in countries that are poor and can't afford these plants.
But just a couple corrections re potlatch society: slavery happened in the Pacific Northwest with and without potlatch; potlatch didn't cause slavery. The fishing grounds in this region were the richest in the world at the time (they collapsed almost a century ago under white rule), if you conquered a neighbor (and that was frequent) you could afford to keep 'em and feed 'em, at least for a long time until your population expanded. So slavery was practical in a way it isn't for nomads, say. Excess production was the norm. Unemployment was dealt with largely by exalting art, and devoting an immense amount of the GNP to that, with spectacular results over time. So most excess labor and production was actually devoted to art, not giveaways. I suspect that's the real lesson, although I'm a No Man's Sky devotee - it's a damn wonderful art generator, if you like landscapes, as I do. Maybe humans can't compete there, anymore, either! Warlordism in an age of drones will do little for unemployment; but it's also easier, particularly for democracies, if only your machines get bent up in a successful war of aggression. So it may happen more, but will not be a safety valve for unemployment.
That's a non-sequitur, you may as well say we're seeing this with the explosiong of freelancers and personal businesses.
Because that's really what those youtube personalities are, but that doesn't really address the issue of the older folks who have lost their jobs.
Warlordism sounds much worse than communism and fascism. Any culture that is sufficiently advanced to not be chaos and wars for the lords under walordism, would be much better without the warlords. Advanced societies with abundant resources and abundant capital do not need gatekeeping hoarders playing charity Olympics.
The rest you've said is a gross misrepresentation of the giveaway culture shared amongst many more tribes than just the Northwest ones. And of course, white academia will just refuse and say "our written documentation written by genocidal outsiders is way more accurate than what the cultures themselves say about themselves through their own oral traditions".
This must be an interesting book that somehow argues that wars that killed huge numbers of civilians somehow had zero impact. Looking at the criticism of the book it seems to also argue that there were no negative effects of colonialism.
Funny, I wonder if the millions of people killed in North America between 1500 and 1900 would agree with that.
Which, come to think of it, it's true.
Except some guilt maybe.
This system didn't work very well at the time (it bred slavery and warlordism, and produced a lot of waste, especially towards the end, when trade goods were abundant and population was running out); but it'll become increasingly more doable as capital becomes more productive. Magnanimity is a human instinct, and people already compete on status and prestige; just persuade holders of capital that supporting the unemployed/unemployable is a good thing, make sure they get personal feel-good-ness out of it, and persuade the unemployed/unemployable not to run up the red flag, and you've probably got a stable system.
Probably. I don't think we need to worry about slavery much, but warlordism could become a serious issue. Where potlatch-like culture exists, aggressive bids for the throne (or equivalent) tend to follow; the Earl of Warwick in the War of the Roses comes to mind. Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die) -- the Wars of the Roses had roughly zero impact on the common people of England. (See A Farewell to Alms for a detailed discussion of how England's wars, starting from a pretty early date, avoided messing up England's people.)
This is all hypothetical, though; I'm not saying that a potlatch orientation is the only possible solution, nor even that it's necessarily a working solution at all...