[devoply]

What sort of corruption is possible when everything is done by machines. The greatest argument to privatized enterprise is efficiency, but how does that argument hold up with factories that are massively automated. Why are owners of such an enterprise needed at all?

If everything is automated then such companies need no owner as the ownership is to make sure the work gets done properly. It will be done properly no matter what the owners do. Why are they entitled to anything more than your average person.

I would think in the future you have shareholders, people who own the machines, that employ like a few workers who are managed by machines. And therefore those shareholders can just be just about anybody or even governments... who take the profit or revenue that enterprise generates and distribute it to the people.

I am talking about something like this sort of business which does not change, or grow much. It's a commodity. It can just be produced by pretty much anyone.

[philipkglass]

If we reach that point I would prefer to see people vote for government to construct new automated production facilities and provide their benefits to the people. Rather like how I think that voters should be able to vote for a government owned power plant, sewage treatment plant, library, broadband provider, etc. but I don't think they should be able to vote to seize the nearest privately owned book store for conversion to a public library.

If you build public facilities in parallel there's no unjust seizure of existing assets. (Some people will complain that it's unfair to allow the government to do anything at all that could reduce the profitability of existing private assets, but I don't think that those people make up a prohibitive share of the population.)

[devoply]

With the amount of unused capital that is available in the system these days... I don't know why anyone would, anyone should be able to buy machines and build their own factory. It's just that those assets would not be growth assets. In fact if anything I would think investors would not be interested in investing in that sort of enterprise... as the returns are nominal so it makes sense for governments to run these sorts of things like utilities.

[samstave]

Wouldn't such a society be predicated on the idea that everyone has a basic income - and these fully automated factories with no (state?) ownership would be relegated to producing the basic consumables that come along with a society that provides all the basics for survival and hygiene and ideally health (mental and physical)

As such, a society would find value in the skills of the populous which produce things that have a "human" value for having been created by a human.

Further, it would seem that the overall population would drop significantly. Especially as technology for automation iterates, machines will care for human basic needs, and will care for maintenance and production of other machines to keep the system going.

Will AI manage the overall resource supply chain?

It would be interesting to see a critically thought out matrix of all the roles which could be done by machine/automation/AI vs that which must require a human.

What about "soft" skills required to run a civilization; politics and law for example.

Where politics is fundamentally required to ensure stability of an economy and society such that humans can survive in an ordered world, it is clearly exploitable and shouldn't we be attempting to remove as much human cruft from that process as possible - but ensuring that human empathy remains. As machines cannot have empathy. (At what point do we trust "programmed empathy" in AI?)

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While there are all these efforts on ML to get machines to "see", say, cats in a picture, are there any efforts for teaching an AI to discern emotion in any given scenario?

Then ultimately, an AI will use all this to interpret intent...

[someSven]

Civilized societys resepect property. They are entitled to it, because it's theirs.

Besides, who would invest in a country where people have such a mindset? And what is with companies owned by local and international shareholders?