I agree that the the rate at which awareness is growing is slower than desirable. However, I'd like to see a noteworthy proposal on how to speed it up, because in the end it all boils down to people's opinions and choices. This is related with your last paragraph about consumer education. If education is unsuccessful in raising social and environmental awareness, how do you propose then that RBE ideas should be taught and accepted by the people? Of course that starving people won't see environmental issues has being important; those people will probably not even be aware of such issues. But this is a red herring as long as there are lots of well fed people which, nonetheless, also seem oblivious to environmental issues. If people who have the opportunity to do so develop their awareness and act accordingly, this will lead to the creation of opportunities for more people to do the same, and so on.

Profit is not based on environmental or social hazard. Problems may be regarded as opportunities for people to profit from providing solutions to society, as well as any human necessities of desires which will always be present, whichever the economic model. The prospect of profiting constitutes an incentive for people to interdependently work towards addressing each others needs within the vast and complexly diverse sets of people which are today's societies. It is not the only possible motivation, but it is a widely recognized motivation nonetheless. Also, there is profit to be made through ecologically or socially conscious endeavors if consumers value these features; there are already a number of institutions making their profit while striving for environmental balance and social care.

Regarding so-called "cybernated AI systems", you should be aware while research into AI is bubbling with activity and promising results, what RBE proposes is, for the time being, more akin to science fiction than to the actual state of the art technology. Furthemore, a machine will only do what men program them to do. Even if there is such an AI making the decisions (a view which I personally find completely abhorrent), its working principles, its decision trees, and all the underlying algorithms would have to be decided upon and programed into it by people making not only scientific, but also political assessments of what should and should not be. Who would do such a thing? Would it be a democratic process? Would there be social mechanisms for discussing and altering its functioning? There you have politics again.

Regarding resource surveying, I completely agree that the data should be much more transparent and accessible to the public. No further comments on that issue.

Your thought experience about implementing technology having infinite money and no desire for profit is an interesting one. The problem with it is that having infinite money would mean that money would be worth nothing at all, effectively being as if there was no money, as you've said. Then, how would we decide upon what gets done and what doesn't (since our work capacity is limited), how to do whatever we decide that we should do (because there are lots of different ways to do the same thing), and finally how to distribute the end produce (which would arguably not be enough to be distributed among every single person in the world)?

Politics, in the form of the political institutions at play, has a tremendous room for improvements regarding their efficacy, efficiency, and work ethics. It moves in very sinuous ways and it takes very long to arrive at some resolutions and to enforce them. The problem here is the same as I've stated above: politics is a reflection of what people value and of how people decide to act upon those values. Whichever the system, it will always be difficult to juggle so many different views of the world, so many different interests and motivations, and so many intricate and interconnected issues than require attention. RBE is not different in this respect; it just hides these problems under the pretense of a "reign of scientific enlightenment and consensus". This proposed state of affairs is, in my view, totally unfeasible.

There is this thing about RBE puzzles me: it starts by observing that resources are finite and scarce due to the physical dimensions and constitution of the earth; then it blames the economic system for scarcity; and then it introduces RBE as something which will somehow transform scarcity into abundance. We can certainly increase efficiency, and definitely should, but this is not the same thing as performing a miracle of multiplication.

I agree 100% in the following terms: the current social and economic systems need reassessment, rethinking, and restructuring. Alas, I believe this to be true at any place and at any time in the past, present and future of humanity. And it has been so for the entire lifespan of civilization. I admire people who come forward with innovative views on how we could make things work better. But I get very suspicious whenever something is presented as an all-purpose miraculous elixir. This often means one of two things: either the people proposing it are charlatans, or they haven't thought it through as thoroughly as they should. I believe that most of RBE proponents fall into the latter alternative, because I can't seem to cease finding loose ends and ill-defined concepts within RBE. RBE is noble at heart, interesting for its novelty, certainly worth a deeper analysis, but ultimately in its infancy stage.