And if voting doesn't work, there's the possibility of a revolution.

So the capital owners will probably make it so that they please a majority of people just enough to stay in power.

I'm not so convinced, I think this comes from the limited mental model of thinking of the economy as a system for making widgets.

Rather, the economy is what happens when a society organizes its member's aggregated needs and desires.

Being a valued member of a community is a rather basic human need. As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.

That's a rather unconventional view maybe, but I'm rather convinced it's the right one.

Of course, it leaves all the details open and the path to get there might be rocky.

I'm sorry. You are claiming that the poor will buy job-alternatives from the market once they don't have a job to sustain themselves?

You seem to be missing a slight power imbalance.

I'll tell you what I'd do with it.

I'd ask that genie for more wishes and have it start making copies.

Why don't you think it would follow the same cost curve as integrated circuits?

Yes. What's the cost of relocating software, or a movie, or an audio file? Very close to 0 (a few cents at most), and yet observe how much our current system prices each of those items. Capitalism, as practiced today, maximizes profits, not competition, I don't see that changing any time soon

You can see similar effects in hardware too, since even without self-replication there are already massive economies of scale. How much does it cost to get access to the output of most advanced chip fabrication technology on the planet? The answer is whatever the price of the latest flagship smartphone is.

Therein lies the problem with the assertion that prices will inevitably driven downwards: the price of a flagship phone is not driven by cost of making it - instead the OEMs select a price-point first and then work backwards from there. When was thr last time the price of a flagship smartphone decreased?

First:

Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.

If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

Second:

The aggregated desire of billions of people is a formidable force. Whoever finds a way to satisfy it will have found a way to become incredibly wealthy.

I hear this quite often but I don't think it's true. I don't think we've quite hit the stopping point yet for consumption but I mean you give somebody 2 Yachts and they'll probably try to sell both of them and bank most of that money. Like ask yourself what'd you do with a 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B, 10B windfall? Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself (possible save it in a rainy day fund but w/e; consumption stops).

Of course you give everybody 10M right now it'll cause massive inflation as there isn't enough stuff actually being produced. However, GDP (adjusted for inflation) has been increasing so at some point we'll make more stuff than one can reasonable consume and at that point it'll probably be Wall-E world. However, we are talking about a windfall of 10M which is 151x the US GDP/Capita so assuming current rate of growth remains linear it'll take another 250 years for the Real GDP/Capita to be 10M (~1k in 1790 [1] to ~66k in 2023 => 151 / 66 ~= 2.5).

> If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create. So if energy becomes significantly cheap in the future I'd expect a lot of new goods to be cheaper than today's goods (which also makes it easier for everybody's consumption to go up). Of course many goods are sold by few suppliers and monopoly pricing reflects the value perceived by the consumer so there's a giant wrench.

[1]: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php

Only for a limited definition of "spending on myself". Self actualization is where desire truly is boundless. 10B is not a lot of money if your goal in life is now to end malaria or build a city on Mars.

Another issue with your thought experiment is that you're now relatively rich. If in some distant future you have the purchasing power of a billionaire of today without being relatively rich, many people will be looking for new ways of outdoing each other.

Of course, consuming zero cost goods is not a measure of wealth, so they'll be consuming whatever isn't zero cost then.

> I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create.

I don't. The price of physical energy fluctuates with how difficult it is for humans to tap it.

I prefer the mental model that the price reflects the human difficulty - perseverance, pain, time, intelligence, physical force, ... - required to provide something.

I don't know that there's really any study or data that would back it up, but if a large amount of people don't have the structure and expectations that employment provides, things would deteriorate quickly.

Obviously there's a spectrum here, and mindless jobs that pay as little as legally allowed aren't exactly providing fulfillment that people need. In any individual case, of course it makes sense to say "why should I/they have to do this? they should be able to chase passions or find other opportunity" but when you talk about that being "granted" to large chunks of the population (happening at essentially the same time).. I don't see it working out super well in the short or long term.

I like that definition.

the past couple centuries have seen a great advancement in application of the economic mode to greater areas of life. there are both clear and nominal benefits and downsides. its advance doesn't necessarily mean it's satisfying equivalent needs and desires, nor that it is more effective or objectively preferable.

it's well-documented that often it has advanced by threats, dispossession, and violence. and it's certainly possible that could continue, or that it might lose ground on some externality, or sustain hegemony by those same tools.

Number of people producing goods has been shrinking for a longest time, its under 20% now. It'll likely keep shrinking as automation becomes more advanced, and in the future "service" would be much more important.

When I was a kid, I've read some sci-fi stories about societies like those, where most people were working in service industry.

[0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2023/09/0...

A job can be truly 'lost' if it's replaced by a machine. But it's merely reshuffled, if a foreigner does it.

And if you break your phone, it stops being a (useful) phone.

That will mark the time when technology is advanced enough that humanity will fracture with small independent groups going out and fending for themselves, possibly in outer space. Some SF scenarios call them "great houses", because they somewhat resemble feudal kingdoms where a kind of extended family rules, except there are no peasants.

Look at life in Gaza or on the streets of Kensington today, and that is the sort of destiny we are bound for -- if fully replacing all humans really ever happens -- to become totally disposable people, who only continue to survive because someone has found it too much hassle to get around to getting rid of you at least just yet.

But that's an endgame state, it's not a path for getting there, thank goodness. I believe it would not be so simple. It would happen gradually, and it would engender resistance, eventually violent resistance once people have little to lose.

Power grows out of the barrel of a gun after all.

Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.

But can you even get to that state without provoking a war before you get there? AI is extremely vulnerable in war because of its reliance on datacenters and fabs, which are fantastic military targets in wartime. So easy and quick to sabotage and so expensive and slow to build.

They will, as did monarchs in feudal times, draw their power base from the multitude of disenfranchised commoners seeking guidance, respite from the bleak outlook for those with little or no prospect of upward mobility, and a rallying point from which to focus any semblance of pushback against the landed baronial classes. But they will all the while be paying a hefty tax to those who maintain the broadcast infrastructure that enables them to marshall and monetize their followers, so even these kings and queens will need to stay in the graces of some potentate or other.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington,_Philadelphia the Crime section

But you didn't mention the Soldier class. Some security people are needed, with an ok decent life, to keep the masses in check, and put up surveillance cameras and collect everyone's photos and biometrics

A bit like in Uganda, "Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40603692

> Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.

1. Supply drives demand. If nobody produces anything with which to buy the factory output, then the factories will not be valuable.

2. If most people are somehow living "outside" the economy, then they would form their own economy.

Those are but two trivial rebuttals, and by no means anywhere near exhaustive.

If with enough automation that's not necessary then it doesn't matter. Why operate a sneaker factory to get the money to buy caviar from the caviar factory when you can just operate the caviar factory directly?

Put another way, china thanks to it's new middle class is a great market for a business to sell to. That's because they have something of value to trade back.

But the Congo, full of people or not, isn't. They don't have anything any capitalist could want that would equal the value of finished middle class goods. All they have to offer is cheap raw materials or perhaps labor to extract. If people are made useless, we will all be from the Congo except the legacy capital owners, who can trade with each other for everything they might want.

Regarding #2, they would form their own garbage shit economy whose size and per capital size are like specks of dust compared to the main one, with obvious consequences for power dynamics when the two economies interact. Think of the underground economy in a prison, a homeless encampment, or a warzone, or subsistence farming peasanta deep, deep in thr Congo. Or the "economy" formed by insects trading pollen services for nectar with plants. That's how small and weak the economy of the leftover people with no access to the global industrial machine would be by comparison.

The world economy today isn't driven by lack of supply (for the vast majority categories of products), rather it is by lack of demand. Whoever owns the demand owns the power in this dynamic. One can have all the factories in the world when consumer stop buying it's in for a rough time, like China is finding out.

What's wrong with ready-made chocolate cake? Freshly-baked might be better, but there is value in convenience. It's the same reason people buy pizza: if you're a master pizza chef and have a proper pizza oven at home, you could probably make a better pizza, and of course have it a bit fresher, but most people simply can't make a pizza that comes close to those made in real pizza ovens by people who make them every day. Some people don't even have an oven in the first place.

Maybe? This has been hypothesised since the Industrial Revolution. We’re nowhere close to labour obsolescence.

The consumption machine has a wealth effect which is an artifact of a ponzie economy. This mathematically cannot last forever, even if it has lasted for a long time and will continue to last for a long time. What matters to wealth is production. Traditionally highly technical production needed a decent middle class, but efficiencies mean fewer such people are needed to maintain the same proficiency. Coupled with globalization where a smart person anywhere can design technical things that can then be used everywhere. This decouples the wealth of the rich from the health of the middle class and the rich would be happily sacrifice the middle class in the alter of cheaper labor and will whisper sweet nothings in your ear while doing so. Not them personally but the people they pay to operate on their behalf. To me it makes perfect sense to promise UBI to undermine resistance and then not deliver on that promise to again undermine resistance. I think the middle class would be fools to believe that UBI will come and save them.

UBI is a power play and the worst outcome for a sovereign citizen.

Eugenics has always been the end game for the monarch class. Capitalism was a stepping stone.

If you're talking about a world where AI has become so advanced that humans have literally nothing to contribute to society, in any field, then that's called a post-scarcity society, where the very concept of a "business owner" (not to mention the concepts of "business" and "owner") starts to lose all meaning.

So AI can build everything except the factory itself? Sounds like there's still a need for human labor.

And if the opposite is true and AI can build the factory, then it's not going to "cost tens of billions of dollars to build"; the factory will be just as cheap as the goods its producing. Literally everyone could have their own factory.

So whoever builds the first one will be able to quickly expand, buy more land and solidify their lead.

Land is likely what would cost billions in this specific scenario.

There was a podcast I listened to on this subject "The Plunder of the Commons" which I found really interesting. [1]

That said, we're a long ways away from reaching the point where literally not having anywhere left on the planet to build becomes your primary obstacle to starting a business.

[1]: https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/the-plunder-of-the-com...

It can be argued that it already started - globally the number of children born peaked around 2013-2017. The pandemic only accelerated the process.

[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/80174608 (Volume 2: "Pop Squad").

There's still enormous room for abuse, but automating suppression drops even the imperfect checks that we have on the power of the few to oppress the many

  > police-adjacent things before they were called the police

That can be solved, too. Some other (now deleted?) comment mentioned the inevitability of killbots, which will have to be created and deployed for this dystopia to stick. The elite living in Elysium will need a controllable, automate-able, way to keep the underclass in line, one that doesn't involve less-reliable human enforcers.

I thought the rich elites living in Elysium had to completely depend on one weird mercenary dude on Earth with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher that somehow had rockets that could achieve escape velocity in order to protect Elysium from spaceships with illegal immigrants attempting to invade and use their magic healing machines.

And unlike the last times where feudalism was overthrown, these days police is often enough on par with the military, and the governments can track us whenever and wherever we want by the tiny little bugs we carry around in our pockets. Call for a revolution or for violent acts online, and a day later the FBI knocks on your door and takes everything digital you have.

I'm pretty sure this is completely unique to the USA.

To me that represents lingering inhumanity.

There are still plenty of people around the world who have maintained this high lifestyle proudly since their early ancestors first got into opulent condition. But there are even more descendants who have not been able to maintain a previous level of opulence at all and would do anything to get it back.

Then you've got a whole bigger group who never came close and are even more envious than those who once had luxury. So much of the time it's easy to recognize that improved wealth is a result of fortune one way or another. When you get an aggregate amount of greed focused on manipulating fortunes, the best they can do for themselves is when everyone else ends up barely subsisting.

IIRC, civilization was supposed to bring an end to the barely subsistence thing.

Doesn't look too civil when things trend backward toward medieval.

It'll start with just businesses owning the prototypes of them but once common folk know that such a machine is possible they'll build one themselves and then use it to build as many as they want.

If it's a very large machine it will be miniaturized until it fits inside the human body and everyone will have synthetic ribosomes that can be used to produce whatever they want provided they have access to enough energy and raw material.

What happens then is anyone's guess.

Horses weren't needed and they became pets; same for average human.

This can only happen perfectly if the manufacturers eventually start to come after those who are self-reliant, which I believe is in line with the psychology of humans.

Funny thing is this is ALSO analogous to what we have done certain animals.

What exactly will be different in the future from the current situation?

This makes me wonder, what happens to the dogs.

(or today's, in some places)

Also it wouldn't have happened hadn't it been for Gorbatjov who introduced the glasnost (transparency) policy reform. Another Stalin, and history would have looked different.

It's no longer human culture in animal nature; but owner culture in anthroposcenic nature.

What happens when one that can live centuries in an intellectual enlightened form lives in a world of pollutatition, cities, old infastructure—and of course the organic leftovers?

---

Noteworthy to say this makes up perhaps half of cyberpunk's foundations—one should not ever define cyberpunk solely with this idea.

The government will then redirect that labour to other stuff they can make and export; and make more money.

Making machines that think will turn out to be a lot cheaper and easier than building machines that can do general purpose physical work. People are cheap to make and maintain, especially if you're not very concerned with their well-being.

So far we have automated more and more, including and especially grunt work.

Why would grunt work come back?

Especially if you have machines that can help you design more efficient machines, and can help you re-design production processes to be more efficient and amenable to further automation.

If you're willing to deny them all that then they're cheap and easy to replace.

Whereas building a machine that can do even the basics of what a human hand can do is quite expensive.

It's not about what the employer is willing to do, it's about what people are willing to accept; especially if there's competition for their services.

> Whereas building a machine that can do even the basics of what a human hand can do is quite expensive.

We even have robots that can wash dishes, and they are cheap enough to be in a substantial proportion of households. There's lots of of basics and not so basics that we automated.

Of course, build a machine that can do _all_ the basics of a human hand is expensive (at least so far). But people can and have arranged their business processes around these limitations: you don't expect your welding robots to wash dishes; you use a dishwasher for that.

For example, when I lived in Vietnam I'd often see a road crew of ten people with shovels because it was cheaper than hiring one backhoe. A washing machine would be an unimaginable luxury for all of them.

Though I'm not sure what you are trying to say? I guess you are agreeing with me? Yes, if there are many companies that compete for your services and can put them to productive use, you have a lot of bargaining power in those negotiations. Conversely, where those options are lacking, you have less bargaining power.

Yes, Vietnam started from a fairly low base, but has seen phenomenal growth in the last few decades. See eg https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/VNM?zoom=V... You can bet your hat that workers' absolute bargaining power has improved by leaps and bounds.

As a consequence, at https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/wages you can see how average Vietnamese wages have exploded over time. (Even if their data only goes back to 2011, the growth is still very impressive.)

Apparently washing machines are a real growth segment in Vietnam: https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/household-appliances/ma...

These days around 58% of households in Vietnam have a washing machine.

Yes, in general many people around the world used to be dirt poor. And while things have improved, many of these people merely graduated from 'dirt poor' to 'poor'. But that's still progress, and we are continuing to advance. To future generations, even our richest people alive today will look poor by comparison.

I’d like to agree with your final assessment but assuming that the growth arc of the last 50 years is going to continue requires a lot of optimism.

How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work. Sometimes people forget that the workers are also consumers. You may displace some, but to replace all, blue and white? Not that easy.

The idea is that you sell your stuff to people who are employed in other industries/companies that haven't been so successful at automating all their employees out of a job.

At Samsung, for instance, the workers are not the main consumers: Samsung is a huge exporter, and most of their customers are outside of Korea. Even if all their current and former employees suddenly decided to stop buying Samsung products, it wouldn't even be noticeable in their balance sheet.

What you're describing is a situation where all the companies have managed to eliminate most of their workforces, which has never happened. If it comes even remotely close to that point, societies will be forced to change their economies somehow, perhaps with UBI.

The whole "Star Diaries" series is such a gem. Many stories are exploring this question of "what is the endgame for societal trajectory X" in a form of some remote planet that Tichy visits on his trip.

The end game for the US is a small group of people(approx 36M) having fun. It's not too different from how it is now, but rather than be supported by human labor, it's supported by the labor of machines.

If all wage labor is automated, and ignoring the issue of the social and political implications of a mass of people with nothing else to do, the remaining professions will be SME business owners, investors, and landlords[1].

We can estimate the size of this population.

There are approximately 28 million American SMEs[2]. SMEs can have owner-employees or hired labor, all of which will be automated. Considering SMEs as financial black boxes, the inputs, and outputs remain the same with the exception that salaries are replaced by a presumably smaller figure representing either the purchase or rental of automated labor.

An estimated 7 million[3] high-net-worth individuals(HNWI) reside in the US. These are people with large investment portfolios who can live off gains indefinitely. It's difficult to estimate the number of full-time investors, but some estimate range from 200k-1million, and arguably, and these are folks who are doing potentially automatable work anyways.

The upperbound of US landlords is 10.6 million people[4], or 7.1%. There are 5.9 million[5] commercial buildings in the US, compared to 44 million[6] residential rental properties. Let's estimate the number of commercial landlords to be around 1 million people in the US. We can also presume that maintenance and repair is automatable labor.

The common features these groups share is the ability to generate income without labor. Presumably, this leaves them plenty of time to engage in leisure activities.

Looking toward HNWI individuals as an indicator, they spend much more of their time engaged in "active" leisure, that is to say praying, socializing, exercising, hobbies, and volunteering[7].

1. I'm assuming self-employed people are automated away.

2. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...

3. https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/world-we...

4. https://www.doorloop.com/blog/landlord-statistics-by-categor...

5. https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environm...

6. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187577/housing-units-occ...

7. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2019/07/13/how-do-t...

Who will they sell to? For business/markets to exist, it needs people who can buy.

You can already see this at work on platforms like Etsy or Amazon. People are buying tools like crickets, CNC, or 3d printers, then starting a business selling their products (often copies of other successful products) on these platforms.

Eventually, someone will make copy-cat platforms, then someone else will build a tool for building copy-cat platforms, etc. There's no end game, it's just a loop of people trying to replicate the success of others.

We've already seen how over-invested LLMs have gotten relative to their financial returns. A magical AI box with optimal business decisions is even more fantastical - computibility isn't there, and the resulting homogeneity of a 'perfect' approach in business strategy would by game theory promote decisions counter to the prevalent strategies.

The more likely result in a dynamic world is a market crash in the domain of factories as everyone and their dog tries to get in on the "free easy money, last chance to get rich!". The end profit margins would be tight indeed and collapsed values of good.

Not to mention the whole value of money is that it can get you other goods and services while shielding you from the logistical hellscape of trying to DYI. If everything is being auto-produced anyway then currency isn't even desirable a commodity, now is it?