[woodandsteel]

Last year I was pretty excited about Ethereum for a few months. But then I got to thinking about the social problems I care about, like how factory and middle class jobs are being wiped out by robots and AI, and I couldn't think of how DAPS could fix those sorts of problems on a large scale.

[Jabanga]

People are not meant to work in factories. They're meant to own parts of factories and other productive enterprises. Ethereum reduces the barriers to entry to becoming a stakeholder in value created by enterprises. The cost to exchange a token is 1000X less than the cost to exchange a security. This is an orders of magnitude reduction in barriers to entry and expansion of liquidity. It means the economy can grow in all directions and become more inclusive in its ownership structure.

We're still very early days, but this is what distributed smart contracts make possible. The second and third order consequences of this will be enormous.

[woodandsteel]

Do you mean people won't work in factories but instead sit around and collect profits, or do you mean people will work in factories but own them cooperatively, or that people will work but not in factories but in some other type of economic enterprises, or what?

And could you give me a link where this is described in more detail, including addressing various possible objections?

[Jabanga]

I mean people will sit around and collect profits.

I don't have any links about this. This is my own view on an ideal future. I haven't come across any objections to it.

[woodandsteel]

>I don't have any links about this. This is my own view on an ideal future. I haven't come across any objections to it.

This is what I am talking about. Ethereum supporters think it is going to make the economy into an anarchist-libertarian techno-paradise, but they don't present specific ideas and write them up so they can be subjected to critical scrutiny. You know, lots of ideas seem great until you try to work them out.

My own thought is that economics starts with basic needs and desires, like for food, shelter, health care, internet access, and so on. Today these are provided largely by small and medium enterprises, and people earn their money working for them. I don't see how most of these things could be provided by DAPS, and so I conclude Ethereum isn't going to make much difference to the average person.

[Jabanga]

Here's a more detailed write-up on it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/61lg8g/the_robo...

You're right that there are no complete road maps written out. But proponents of this vision can hardly be blamed for not being able to create a detailed plan for things they believe will be invented. It will necessarily be impossible to predict exactly what form the future will take. Yet we can make reasonable extrapolations based on the nature of knowledge, and the role knowledge plays in investment.