Thanks for your years of service to the Company, Jim.

[Doktor Howl]

second time in a week that i thought this short story seemed somewhat appropriate to link to:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

While I am not a transhumanist, let me just say that I would love to live in a society where I had the complete freedom to study and create with no worries about all of the other stuff. That would be the perfect society for a scientist, right there.

Sucks to be the guy wearing the headphones, though.

Robots were supposed to do the shitwork, and humans the planning...Not the other way around.

NOT MY FUTURE.

[Requia ☣]

The Manna system seems very very plausible to me.  There's already some work using human visual processing to assist a computer.

The computer picks out possible face matches with a high degree of inaccuracy, then shows them to the person, the person looks at the pictures for about a third of a second, at which point eye motion will tell the computer if that person thinks the two pics are of the same people.

Then if they are the same people, the computer calls security or cops as appropriate.

Just one of the many toys brought to you by the war on terror.  Though I don't know if they ever installed it.

[Doktor Howl]

The Manna system seems very very plausible to me.  There's already some work using human visual processing to assist a computer.

The computer picks out possible face matches with a high degree of inaccuracy, then shows them to the person, the person looks at the pictures for about a third of a second, at which point eye motion will tell the computer if that person thinks the two pics are of the same people.

Then if they are the same people, the computer calls security or cops as appropriate.

Just one of the many toys brought to you by the war on terror.  Though I don't know if they ever installed it.

Nick Nolte better hope Gary Busey doesn't commit any crimes.

[Remington]

second time in a week that i thought this short story seemed somewhat appropriate to link to:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

While I am not a transhumanist, let me just say that I would love to live in a society where I had the complete freedom to study and create with no worries about all of the other stuff. That would be the perfect society for a scientist, right there.

Sucks to be the guy wearing the headphones, though.

Robots were supposed to do the shitwork, and humans the planning...Not the other way around.

NOT MY FUTURE.

Which is the basis of the Australia system.

[Doktor Howl]

second time in a week that i thought this short story seemed somewhat appropriate to link to:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

While I am not a transhumanist, let me just say that I would love to live in a society where I had the complete freedom to study and create with no worries about all of the other stuff. That would be the perfect society for a scientist, right there.

Sucks to be the guy wearing the headphones, though.

Robots were supposed to do the shitwork, and humans the planning...Not the other way around.

NOT MY FUTURE.

Which is the basis of the Australia system.

What, shove all the humans onto leaky boats and send them to a giant desert?

[Requia ☣]

No, communism, but with robots.

[Remington]

second time in a week that i thought this short story seemed somewhat appropriate to link to:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

While I am not a transhumanist, let me just say that I would love to live in a society where I had the complete freedom to study and create with no worries about all of the other stuff. That would be the perfect society for a scientist, right there.

Sucks to be the guy wearing the headphones, though.

Robots were supposed to do the shitwork, and humans the planning...Not the other way around.

NOT MY FUTURE.

Which is the basis of the Australia system.

What, shove all the humans onto leaky boats and send them to a giant desert?

Nah, it's part of the story Iptous linked to.

Basically, most if not all of the businesses in the US replaced their human labour with robots.This resulted in a class of several thousand trillionaires, and 300,000,000 welfare recipients packed into what were essentially concentration camps. Capitalism only worked in an economic system under scarcity: when cheap robot labour meant that everyone could have whatever they wanted, natural market forces ended up hyper-concentrating the wealth into a tiny group.

The "Australia Project" is the second half of the book, where they detail a system under which the robots would work for the humans' benefit and not the other way around. A kind of communism, actually, the original Marxist kind that now worked due to having essentially unlimited resources.

[Doktor Howl]

second time in a week that i thought this short story seemed somewhat appropriate to link to:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

While I am not a transhumanist, let me just say that I would love to live in a society where I had the complete freedom to study and create with no worries about all of the other stuff. That would be the perfect society for a scientist, right there.

Sucks to be the guy wearing the headphones, though.

Robots were supposed to do the shitwork, and humans the planning...Not the other way around.

NOT MY FUTURE.

Which is the basis of the Australia system.

What, shove all the humans onto leaky boats and send them to a giant desert?

Nah, it's part of the story Iptous linked to.

I know.  But that's not what would really happen.  What would really happen is the moment the guy put his thumbprint down, he'd be rendered into raw materials to feed the other welfare dwellers.

We can't let the people in the terrafoam get ideas.

[Remington]

second time in a week that i thought this short story seemed somewhat appropriate to link to:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

While I am not a transhumanist, let me just say that I would love to live in a society where I had the complete freedom to study and create with no worries about all of the other stuff. That would be the perfect society for a scientist, right there.

Sucks to be the guy wearing the headphones, though.

Robots were supposed to do the shitwork, and humans the planning...Not the other way around.

NOT MY FUTURE.

Which is the basis of the Australia system.

What, shove all the humans onto leaky boats and send them to a giant desert?

Nah, it's part of the story Iptous linked to.

I know.  But that's not what would really happen.  What would really happen is the moment the guy put his thumbprint down, he'd be rendered into raw materials to feed the other welfare dwellers.

We can't let the people in the terrafoam get ideas.

I didn't see any logical problem with it.

The terrafoam wasn't built with malevolent intent, the government just wanted all the poor people to be out of sight. Out of sight in the terrafoam is exactly the same as out of sight in Australia, and it's one less mouth to feed for them. Why wouldn't they let them go?