Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future

The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing and foo

There are immensely rich people in the U.S., but they all seem to have large egos. They would rather compete and bash each other than cooperate. They are constantly suing one another. And none of them wants to have anything to do with taxes. With all that happening, it is very hard to get people together to work on big projects. It makes it much ha

"The robots won't let you walk away because, if they did, you would end up as a homeless person on some city street. Without a job, you are by default homeless in the American economy. None of the wealthy people want to look at homeless people, so you are warehoused here and forced to stay here."

"Will we ever make love together?" I asked. "I cannot predict the future." She said. "But I would say that the probability of that event is high." I looked at her and she looked at me for a moment.

it's all free. By being a shareholder, you already own your share of the resources. The robots make products from the free resources you and everyone else already owns. There is no forced labor like there is in America. You do what you want, and you get 1,000 credits per week. We are all on an endless vacation."

In the U.S., everyone had to work, and in most cases "work" meant doing something that a rich person wanted so that the rich person could get richer.

In Australia, these people could completely fulfill themselves, and humanity would be much better off because of their contributions. Creative people want to -- need to -- create. That is their passion. Instead of millions of talented people working in jobs that had nothing to do with their dreams, simply to make ends meet, in Australia they could

The switchover to robots was proceeding with remarkable speed, and for some reason it seemed like no one had really thought about the effects of the transition. All of these people being replaced by the robots needed some form of income to survive, but the job pool was shrinking. The American "service economy" was what replaced the "

How would you create a different society, rather than living like this?" "I have no idea. And even if I did, it wouldn't change anything."