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Comment by iak8god | Hacker News Reader

I'm hoping for a future where the machines do all the work required to provide everything human beings need to survive, AND where we've figured out a reasonable way to distribute resources in a world where not everyone will be able to "contribute to society" by spending huge amounts of their waking time doing something they'd not otherwise do, in exchange for tokens that can be redeemed for food and shelter.

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Yes, but that would be communism, so let's just let people who were born into or stumbled into their wealth amass more of it. I think in general we need to start being more thoughtful about how the things we do can sometimes be hurtful to billionaires.

Well, while you’re joking the original idea of communism and what I’ve been taught about Lenin was about excatly this - communism is inevitable because of technical progress. Call it what you want - universal income, handouts, we will end up in communism.

And yet all implementations of communism has failed so does this mean technical progress eventually leads to societal failure? Also I believe we will end up with socialism, not communism.

> And yet all implementations of communism has failed so does this mean technical progress eventually leads to societal failure?

Only if you believe that once an attempt at something has failed, all future attempts will also fail.

> Also I believe we will end up with socialism, not communism.

Socialism is worker control of the means of production, and is an intermediate step along the route to communism, a fully classless and stateless society.

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