[sk0g]

I can't see how that would be possible, unless every country is equally wealthy and all wars and conflicts cease.

What's anyone's incentive for staying in Syria, Iraq, Cuba, or Ukraine when bad things happen? What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries?

Then again, the far reaching implications of extensive automation could lead to this. We'll see!

[huevosabio]

> What's anyone's incentive for staying in... when bad things happen?

Well that's the beauty of it. Right now we are forcing (literally, by force!) people in war-torn countries to remain in them. Should they not have the option of escaping misery?

> What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries?

There would be a new equilibrium. Poorer countries tend to be cheaper, so perhaps middle class first-worlders might move there (e.g. just like some Americans move to Mexico for retirement). Or perhaps the attachment to your local culture is strong enough.

But most important of all, why do we need to keep people in their birth place?

[yummypaint]

A captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence. If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land. Part of why ISIS was able to scale so effectively was by capturing economic output. If people were able to flee it might have a quenching effect.

[dragonwriter]

> A captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence.

I'd say it is almost the reverse; the desire to establish a captive population is what leads one to seek power through violence.

> If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land.

If you hold land by force, you can thereby deny people freedom of movement in any direction. That's actually the only way to deny people freedom of movement, whether you concentrate on the inbound direction (as many countries do whether or not they also care about the other direction) or the outbound direction (Cold War East Germany, for a well-known example).

[TomMarius]

The problem isn't that they were held (ISIS didn't have resources for such large scale operation), but that no place has accepted them.

[dragonwriter]

“No place accepted them” is also largely denial by force (both at boundaries and in the interior of they manage to evade it at boundaries), just from the other direction.

[withinboredom]

Those that can leave, leave. Why leave the poor behind to be fodder in a war?

[sk0g]

The ease of straight up abandoning countries could have a minor rise in extremism leading to a full-on takeover. All the decent people would want none of that, and life would be easier elsewhere anyway.

Such infighting and geopolitical issues would just get us back to where we are now, with maybe a few more EU-esque bubbles remaining.

Sounds rather dystopian.