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Re:The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 [pdf] by Spivak on Monday May 06, 2019 @11:09AM (#19840120)
> There is no universal law of the universe that requires the 10% of robot builders to own everything on earth

In your universe the universal law is that the robot builders have (collectively) nigh absolute leverage over the rest of society. Without the angel assumption they would slowly (or quickly) use that leverage to amass power.

People wouldn't live in rags or whatever but all secondary economies point to providing value to the robot builders.

Re:The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 [pdf] by AnthonyMouse on Monday May 06, 2019 @11:38AM (#19840372)
That's assuming the robot builders have some kind of a monopoly. If anybody can build robots but it only takes 10% of people to do it before we have all the robots we need to do everything then the wages for robot builders will be as low as the wages for anything else, otherwise more people would become robot builders and drive down their wages.

But wages are always relative to prices. If everything is being made by robots that nobody has a monopoly on then everything should be very inexpensive. Having to work for the same nominal wages as you had in 2003 is not that much of a problem if nominal prices are now 5% of what they were then.

The problem comes when you have some kind of corruption or distortion or regulatory compliance costs keeping some prices high (see: housing, education, medicine) even as general wages are flat or decline, or just grow less than those costs.

Re:The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 [pdf] by djakjxnanjak on Monday May 06, 2019 @02:22PM (#19842241)
We will have to pass regulations to keep those evil tech companies under control, and those regulations will conveniently create huge barriers to entry in the robot construction business.