userlame Civilization seems fundamentally exploitative. After all, it is an incredible amount of work to maintain what are essentially non-automatic processes.
I doubt that automation will ever pan out, because the machines in question are complex systems that did not derive from evolution. So they're not at all reliable, and require constant fixing. This is what happened with transfer machines back in the 20th Century: they were machines designed to move parts from one process to the next, and it never went anywhere because they were always breaking.
I feel like they will always overwork us. They'll demand as much as they're allowed to get away with without people throwing a fit.
The problem with socialism is that if it is unable to reorganize the means of production to achieve communism, then it will eventually break down. Because fundamentally it is based in a communal, not a civilized mode of organization -- so it causes a lot of chaos.
Left-leaning capitalist governments tend to eventually abandon their policies, and pursue austerity.
It seems there's small-scale tribal communalism, and capitalism as our options. And capitalism has to be maintained by the state, otherwise it devolves into a traditional economy (which might actually be a good thing).
