Basically it is income?

Almost 20 years ago, I was having a discussion with an extremely brilliant co-worker about a monetary-less society. Kind of like my understanding of the Star Trek world.

I have had this conversation with a bunch of people over the years. The response from this co-worker however, was quite a shock and makes me hesitate to bring up the subject with others.

I respected the guy. I thought he was a great software developer. I was hoping we might have shared the idea about doing things to benefit mankind; even just a little bit. His response was that he would quit working if he never got paid.

Years later at a dot-bomb company that I worked for, I wrote some software that pretty much automated someone out of his job. I thought it was a fun project. I assume that guy moved on to better and less repetitive, mind numbing things.

If lots of jobs can be replaced by robots, it could free up lots of people to work on other tasks. But I'm also leery it would allow talented people to choose an indolent life.