We are no where near that. We don't even yet have AIs that can write better code than random college student googling.
We will need to crack fusion (or some other way of creating "free" electricity) and then 3D printers that can convert energy into matter and then slap AGI on top of it and we are in post scarcity society where robots can do everything.
If you miss any one of thous things you won't get there.
There will never be anything free. We always have to pay with labor. But maybe we should share the fruits of labor more equally instead of giving most of it to someone who has some documents they got from their parents.
It is always easy to demand more from the people who are better off than you and attribute their success on luck, be it heretical or not.
I am not going to say that I haven't been more privileged than most of the people on the planet. My ancestors made my country into what it is which gave me free education, low corruption, and in general a good start in life. However there are also a lot of people who had the same start as I did, but managed to squander it on the way.
Everyone should absolutely have equal opportunities in life. Education should be free for everyone. Bare human necessities should be taken care of no matter what you do. But I do not agree that everyone should have equal outcome no matter what.
"they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a failure because currently the prosperity of the society needs these people to actually work effectively.
On the other hand, the hypothetical solution of "own the machines and distribute the wealth" is intended for a future which is substantially different, where it doesn't matter if everyone pretends to work or even explicitly avoids working, because that work isn't necessary for prosperity as it can be done by machines, and it ceases to be a problem if everyone can be as lazy as they want.
Artificial scarcity is a thing, so something being dirt cheap to produce doesn't necessarily mean that it will be actually affordable, and in the current economic environment there seems to be sufficient motivation for powerful people to try and make various monopolies based on capital-gated barriers of entry, even if the marginal cost approaches zero; so I'd expect that the default scenario is not like "salt". Getting to a mental model "like salt" seems to be a reasonable outcome in the long run, but I'm afraid that it would take some significant pressure from the masses to get from here to there.
it begins with everyone has enough to begin with, and whatever is importent is available as public services. there are different flavors to do this, the currently best implementation is to have very high&progressive taxes that fund a strong public sector, that in turn makes people feel safe and allows them to pursue higher education (doctors, teachers, ...) that again are needed for all this.
Sure you can work to have more, but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that. instead of focussing on the single one elon musk, try to give everyone access to a good safety net and encourage them to try something, so statistically you will end up with many high-contributors instead of few parasitic billionaires.
> but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that.
Hard disagree. Have you seen the average human, and compare him to somebody like John Carmak, Andrej Karpathy, etc. They create value at least 100x as big as the avg person
And without a society around them to support them, they would be unknown and busy trying to survive.
Even if many people might not be able to do some genius things, they do other stuff that is ultimately mandatory for the geniuses.
So yes, they might produce massively more value, but are still not worth that much more, since they wouldn’t be able to thrive without the others to begin with.
>Is it "just" that someone who drinks and parties all the time "owns" the same amount as someone who works and saves for 20 years?
You mean kinda like capitalism? Where people born into wealth just party and drink all the time and own 10^10 times more then someone who works and saves for 40+ years?
Rawlsian justice is actually an enormously influential idea in political philosophy, arguably the most influential in the 20th century. It has 3 central principles that work together:
1. You enable equality of opportunity.
2. You allow the chance for "winners" and "losers".
3. You adopt the original position ("the veil of ignorance") because no one has foresight into their place of birth and the conditions therein (ie. no one can a priori help themselves), therefore you enact the "difference principle" which states that, insofar as you allow the chance for "winners" and "losers", governments enact policy in such a way that the majority of the benefits of those policies go to the "losers" over the "winners".
There has, of course, been enormous debate on the nature of Rawlsian justice, but it's not like "just" has to immediately equate with communism. Most modern western democracies are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) modelled on Rawls' idea.
