hypothetically, would people produce without incentive?

[kache]

Which has nothing to do with the question, useless meatbag.

Most people would not. Look at most people right now. When not working they're content to watch TV. Those people would simply watch more TV. The only people who would continue to work are those that are already working for more than a living, which is a tiny majority.

What TV?

 

[kache]

Labor also includes research and design. The building blocks for making a gasoline engine didn't fall from the heavens, someone had to devote their time and energy to figuring that shit out. And countless others have improved upon that design in the past century and a half. When I say division of labor, I'm not just talking about the people tightening the bolts, I'm talking about the people who are designing the various components and figuring out how they all work together. And even if one person can build a car, I don't think you'll find anyone who will argue that one person could construct a Saturn V, command module, service module and lunar module and recreate the moon landing entirely on their own. There are some projects that are simply too big for one person to do by themselves, regardless of the number of helper robots they have.

Wrong.
The problem in that case is only knowledge. But OP suggested shared data, directly to the brain. That+IA for organization+robots+replicators for building means anyone would be able to built pretty much anything. Even an entire city, given time.

 

[kache]

Your second paragraph is spot-on. Your first however is caca. Not only are the poor's basic needs met with no exertion from themselves, they even have a surplus which can be invested in drugs. With no real demands on their time and energy, the poor mostly do nothing uplifting or constructive. Moonbeam makes a point about their inability to believe in their ability to do anything uplifting or constructive, but people who value themselves to the point of demanding that others provide for all their wishes still typically do little beyond demanding even more free stuff. Robots would not likely change that. At most, they would be trying to program the robots to make more drugs.


The first two paragraphs of that are pretty profound.


That's a good point too. Problem is, most things that can be invented also require a lot of work which isn't interesting at all. You'd probably find 10,000 Americans who would love to design the next iPad even without a profit motive, but none at all who want to spend the next year of their life formulating and testing different plastics for the case. Same thing in other areas; lot of people would like to design a drug that makes people's lives better, but who wants to spend their lives feeding, cleaning up after, and dissecting rats? Everything worth doing, or nearly, has significant parts which no one would choose to do if they didn't need the money.

And the problem with that is? We'd have betatesters for people making creative drugs.

 

[Brigandier]

Hypothetically, at that point in humanity, what would be left to produce?

 

[werepossum]

And the problem with that is? We'd have betatesters for people making creative drugs.

LOL Yeah, I don't believe man can ever make a reality so good that people won't wish to escape it. I can picture G-d welcoming someone to Heaven and being asked in a conspiratorial whisper "So, dude - are you holding?"