There is a problem that occurs when no private ownership occurs that economists call the problem of the commons. When everybody owns a particular resource, as opposed to one particular person owning the resource, the resource ends up getting wasted. Everybody has an incentive to use the resource, but nobody has an incentive to put time, energy, and money into maintaining the resource. .

The textbook example of the problem comes from Medieval Europe, where were common pastures. The common pastures were overgrazed and were not maintained. When people began taking individual ownership of the common pastures, the pastures were properly utilized. They were not overgrazed. Owners of the pastures put time and energy into improving the pastures and overall agricultural output increased.

This is not to say that private ownership does not bring its own problems. There should be, however, some ideal middle ground between private ownership and common ownership. This regime could be a form of private ownership with communal responsibilities, or communal ownership with individual responsibilities and benefits.

We would not need to completely revamp our property ownership to reach this middle ground, as property ownership entails some degree of communal responsbility. Perhaps there should be more communal responsiblity, but communal responsibility does exist. Property owners pay taxes on the value of their property which go at least partially towards government programs that benefit everyone. Laws and regulations also limit property owners from using their property to harm the community. For example land owners have to follow anti-pollution laws.

The property ownership scheme that exists in the West can aslo be characterized being slightly communal, and conveying communal benefits and responsibilities. It is obvious that the prevalent property ownership laws convey communal responsibiliites. There are numerous laws that prevent the community from interfering with private property. There are however a few instances where the community gets some of the benefits and rights of private property. For example, private property can be subject to an easement where the community is allowed to get the benefit going across a piece of property. The community is allowed to use private property in emergencies. The property can also be confiscated by the community via emminent domain if the property is needed to serve the public good. (Of course, the concept of "public good" has been stretched in recent years, but that is a different topic.)

The very near future will, I think, see the coming of another form of intelligent life on earth: machines. That will give us something to compare ourselves with. Some might say there'll be nothing to compare: since these machines will be made by us, they will inevitably be made in our image. I don't think that is correct. For one thing, we could not design and build the first intelligent machines without the aid of other, somewhat less intelligent machines (just as the most powerful of today's computers could not be designed and built without the aid of other, somewhat less powerful computers). Succeeding generations of intelligent machines will be built by the first: voyez, machine reproduction.

Intelligent machines will come in many forms, and these forms will be subject to the same evolutionary forces that currently drive the development of dumb machines, and propel computer evolution at many times the speed of the organic kind: in a word, market forces. It will not be long before natural selection* turns intelligent machines into beings very different from their creators.

Will they have other ways of dealing with the problem of power, or will it not exist among them at all? We tend to think that machines, being unemotional, would construct a neat, rational kind of society in which all decisions are made for the best ('the best' being determined by powerful simulations and calculations). I think this somewhat naive. In real situations there is often no best decision; only a choice of bad ones. Machine society, too, must have its interest groups, its contending factions. And why should machines not develop emotions? We, too, are machines, albeit enormously sophisticated and autonomous ones, and we have emotions. They are part and parcel of the way our intelligences function. It may be that no moderately advanced intelligence can exist and lack the capacity for emotion.

I think that in the end machine society will have the same problems of power faced by animal societies. Because, you see, the problem of power isn't just a human problem: chimps, dogs, chickens and a host of other creatures have it too.
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* I believe the term is appropriate.

such experiments are by default useless, because they're inherently biased. most if not all artificial 'resources' are introduced from the outside, the remaining task is distribution, which is causing all these problems in the RW.

to put it bluntly, collapse is a more or less natural correction which inevitably happens when (re-)distribution becomes the dominant theme, like today. it is destructive rather than constructive and history knows how to deal with failed civilisations.


there's a difference between being selfish (ie. not sharing) and being agressive (ie. taking from others). the fact that this very important distinction is currently blurred to the point of being apparently unnoticable only aggravates the problem. needless to say, being agressive alone will not suffice to survive on the long run, even if it will cost many peoples lives, but killing does not feed, clothe or move you, does it?