Q. Didn't the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact powers prove socialism to be a failure?

A. Two responses:

First, doesn't the endemic poverty, homelessness, political repression, racism, and imperialism of the United States prove capitalism to be a failure?

Second, the Soviet Union is not a good example, as it was never able to practice socialism, much less cybernetic socialism, for a number of reasons. One, Stalin quickly subverted the country to his own ends, setting up what was essentially state-owned capitalism. He, and the communist party, not the workers, owned the means of production. This situation remained essentially unchanged after his death, with subsequent party leaders maintaining control of the capital of the country. Two, the Soviet Union was placed under economic seige by the U. S. and the West for over fifty years. The threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War forced the Soviet Union to squander precious resources on military build up rather than on economic development. This prevented them from competing successfully with the more economically ruthless and developed nations.

Q. What will happen to motivation under a socialist system?

A. If, by motivation, one means the fear that one ( and one's children ) will be evicted if one is unable to meet the rent, will starve without a paycheck, that form of motivation, (which when one gets down to it, is armed coercion,) will be done away with, and good riddance. If, by motivation one means the desire to slave away at a personally unrewarding job, the robots will do those jobs for us. If, however, by motivation, one means the desire to create, to build, to do good things, these are inherent to humanity, and will always exist. Cybernetic Socialism will provide everyone with the opportunity to fulfill those desires.

Q. What if I like doing my job?

A. Your time will truly be your own, and if you wish to do your old job (or someone else's old job ) as recreation, that's up to you. If, like many jobs, you need other people to do it with you, you'll have to persuade them to do it yourself, and you won't have the leverage of withholding a paycheck to coerce someone into doing something with you that they wouldn't otherwise want to do. That's freedom for you. However someone who always wanted to be a carpenter, for example, will be able to devote their time to say, handcrafting fine furniture, rather than slapping together the same two-by-four framing for another identical house. Moreover, in jobs in which it's important to have good people, e.g. teaching, we will be assured of having only people who want to do them, not just people who couldn't find a better paying job.

Q. What will we do for money?

A. Who cares? 85% of our money now is an electronic fiction, and even the paper isn't worth anything concrete. The real question is how will we distribute the goods and services that we all need and are entitled to. "From the Robots according to their abilities, to the Humans according to their needs."

Q. So who will decide how to distribute the goods and services?

A. Short answer: the people.

Long answer: A respondent to this page suggested that it would be a dictator with the obvious implication that this would be a bad thing. The political structure of many countrys that call themselves communist or socialist have left many people with the misconception that socialism equals totaltarianism. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

A true socialism must be democratic. It does no good to claim that the workers, or in the case of cybernetic socialism the people, control the means of production if the people have no real power of determination.

Exactly how the people of a future cybernetic socialistic society chose to distribute goods and services is not for me to determine here. That will be up to them to decide democraticly.

Some may question the ethics of creating a robotic class of proletariats. Won't we just be exploiting them as badly as humans? What makes it more acceptable to live off of their labor rather than that of humans?

It is an important question, but let us first get a more realistic idea of what kind of technology we are really talking about. Most of this automation will not be androids, that is machines that are made to look and act human. I have a robotic scribe whose human equivalent would have cost a medieval king a pretty price to employ, but mine doesn't mind working for me for no wages at all. Of course, it is not C-3P0 with a quill and inkwell, but my computer printer. Same for my robotic receptionist (answering machine), etc.

However, as robots are called upon to perform more complex and more service related tasks, many will come to resemble humans, both physically and mentally, to a greater and greater degree. Some will also be intentionally made more human for entertainment purposes, or scientific curiosity as well. At what point do we call a robot a person? A life form? Or, more importantly for legal purposes, when is a robot a citizen? This is getting into very tricky areas involving high level neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and philosophical questions of free-will and the nature of life itself.

Robots are at core a computer connected to some device that can perform work. (If we consider computation itself to be work, then by definition all computers are robots.)

The question then is related to the question of artificial intelligence and sentience. Many would agree that computers possess a form of intelligence. The mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing came up with the Turing test of artificial intelligence, which was that when a computer could successfully mimic a human in conversation, and fool its interlocutors, then that would be an intelligent computer. This definition was a bit off the cuff, and has already been reached. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the same test could be performed by a team of humans, with a complex code of prewritten responses, even if those people are ignorant of the messages them selves. Where does the intelligence lie in that case? Who can be said to be intelligent? The program itself?

This problem gets to the heart of what we are really looking for: sentience, or self awareness, on which the jury is still out. Can a computer sense? Is it aware of its own existence? Can it feel emotion?

Amazingly, long before ìDo Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?î and ìBlade Runnerî, before the invention of computers or even the word ìRobotî, L. Frank Baum addressed all of this with his Tik-Tok, the Clockwork Man of Oz. Tik-tok had a spring for thinking, but when he was asked if he felt, he replied in the negative, that he merely acted as if he felt, as that was the way he was ìwound up (i.e. programmed.)î

If we programmed a computer to act as if it felt, I'm not sure it would actually feel. But I don't want to rule it out completely either. Many have speculated that with increasing complexity, computers will eventually spontaneously achieve this awareness once they pass some critical mass.

Let us return however to the question which started this digression: when is it immoral to exploit the labor of a machine? To avoid getting too abstract. let me put forth my own somewhat off the cuff test, which I will humbly call the Lopez Test.

When a computer says ìNo. I don't want to do that.î (without being preprogrammed to say that , of course.), when a computer has its own likes and dislikes, wants and desires, independent of its programming, in short when it begins to exercise its free will, at that point the computer is no longer a servant, but a being in its own right, a citizen, and, I hope, a friend.