[throwaway438290]

I'm willing to believe that we could continue to produce the equipment we do today. But what's the motivation to advance?

Take programming: we could all easily cut down our work hours by just maintaining current systems, which do a huge amount already. There are artificial forces that make us continue to trade one-time innovations for the same living standards as yesterday. Why not automate food production etc, and share the minimal maintenance required?

I think the reason societies that stand still in this way haven't stuck around is ultimately that nations compete with each other, and will come and take everything once they advance further.

[TaylorAlexander]

There are a lot of motivations to advance. Why do we research cancer cures? We use profit motives to encourage the formation of specific organizations but the reason we really care about curing cancer is that we lose loved ones that mean the world to us.

Similarly, the developers of Blender are able to get paid for their work, but it seems that they choose this particular task because it interests them. If they had all of their material needs met, they might take a break and work fewer hours but I’d bet they might still work on blender for fun.

That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just obsessed with designing new robots because it’s fun. In the last three months I’ve created a four axis robot arm from scratch (each gearbox is custom designed and integrated with the 3D printed frame)[1]. Nobody is paying me. The only reason I do paid work is that I need money for survival. But I would still be working on robots if all my material needs were met by machines. And I’d also teach classes on how they work and how to design them, and I’d be in the shop making new designs because that’s already what I spend all my time on.

And we can automate food production! See my profile for the open source farming robot I am designing. And the robot arm I am working on as a personal project is something I hope I can use in a free food production system. You can make a super healthy vegetable and lentil curry for $2 per dish in raw cost. The machine that makes it can be the size of a van and it doesn’t need human workers. If a community owned such a machine they could all eat a really healthy diet for a few dollars a day.

[1] https://twitter.com/tlalexander/status/1453238105230675976?s...

[WalterBright]

I took a 100% pay cut to work on D. But there aren't enough people like that to run a society like that, not remotely close.

[TaylorAlexander]

I think it depends on the society. With automation to reduce absolute labor needs and a people that prefer living in community with the basics to slaving away at a retail job, I think it can be done. People like to work and they like to help one another. We've created a system that isolates people and many of us are sick of it. We would way rather have a hot meal and the company of friends (who are not themselves stuck at some job) than slave away for hours at some retail store that jerks you around for a pittance.

I think if you could build the systems and attract some early adopters, you could prove how much better it is. Once people see it, they would fight to keep it running. They would volunteer their time to keep it going. Or they would agree to a more defined schedule and voluntarily participate in this work agreement to keep it going. The alternative is that they're forced to work for survival so I still think it could be a better deal.

[WalterBright]

Who is going to clean the toilets?