[ExI] robotic lunch counters

[spike]

>… On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] robotic lunch counters

 

Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> , 26/6/2014 10:22 AM:

 

### Let me give you a Marxist answer: Everything depends on who and how controls the means of production (that's the usual commie word for capital).

 

 

>…Still, I think the basic argument is relevant: if capital can replace labour, the economy becomes very different. What society one runs on top of it may be very variable. …Anders Sandberg…

 

 

Ja to both.  

 

But where I was going was a subject I have been pondering a lot recently: taking hunger off the table as a consequence of finding no profitable employment.  This is me talking, the local hardcore minarcho-capitalist.  I can see the value in distributing actual food, rather than the way this is being done today in USA: distributing debit cards, the modern descendant of what we used to call food stamps.  The problem with that approach is that these debit cards can (and are) traded for cash, which is then used for dope and such, while the children are still hungry.

 

In a crisis in the 1930s, the USA did distribute actual food to impoverished citizens.  In those days they had apparently not enough servers, which in itself seems paradoxical with all those unemployed people standing around in the soup lines.  The gangster Al Capone started this one:

 

http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1660.html

 

Now if you had massively parallel robo-servers, we could distribute food to the needy without requiring them to stand in line.  To the argument that this would drive fast food establishments out of business, well, sure.  But those are sundowning anyway because of rising minimum wage everywhere.  Low cost food could be produced and distributed by machine, vegetarian entirely, delivered in edible packaging or packaging that birds would devour, paperless or wrapped in rice paper for instance.  Face recognition software could be used to prevent one person gathering up a lot of the free food to go feed to hogs and such.  I can imagine we could feed masses of unemployed proles at very low cost using a complete protein subsistence meal made of a mixture of beans and rice wrapped in a wheat flour tortilla-like device, wrapped in rice paper, all done by indestructible machine.

 

My notion is that such an arrangement would take starvation off the table while not destroying the work ethic of the population.  Hardcore capitalists don’t want people to go hungry.

 

spike

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