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by fourside 124 days ago
You also need a system that is ok with giving you some of said abundance without you working.

Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government.

To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in with the current political climate.

3 comments

The thing a lot of people leave out is that literally billions must die for this to happen. In some fully automated world everyone except for a few tens of thousands of the owner class and their technicians will be unneeded. And then what to do?
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Dividing infinity by 1m or 1b doesn't matter if it's really infinite. Just make more machines to make the machines. The existential crisis happens afterwards, and people will kill themselves off without the need for any class warfare at all. In fact the owner class will die first since there will be no more conception of ownership, since everything is supposedly abundant and at your fingertips.
You really believe today's billionaire class will just give up their power over the populace? A world of abundance means the billionaires are irrelevant because everyone would have access to everything and they would never let that happen.

They will hoard the resources, land, anything that is needed for people to stay alive.

Your argument seems to be boiling down to, there's no point to improve quality of life because billionaires are just going to hoard all the improvements.

Surely the problem with that is the billionaires, not the world of abundance though?

Voting for 'indifference to peoples dependence on the government' does not equal 'reduce people's dependence on the government'.

There is zero actual intentional reduction of dependence, just elimination of government support.

It fits because now you can start up the conquering war machine and have a bunch of soldiers who're willing to kill in another country before starving in theirs