And as I’ve argued in other threads, a future of mass cheap automated production, where expert systems replace doctors and robots replace plumbers and sexbots replace hookers, owning automated factories won’t make you rich because the marginal cost of everything will be zero. And when the marginal cost of food and consumer goods is zero, then you can only charge commodity prices for them. And there’s no point in deliberately keeping food and goods and services out of the hands of “the poor” since it doesn’t cost anything to provide them, all that shit is provided for the lazy bums by robots.
In other words, the super-rich industrialists and software and media people and bankers and retailers and so on of today are equivalent to the landed aristocracy of the feudal era. Our notions of what it means to “be rich” are going to be upended.
I mean, today it is possible to become extremely rich by producing software and movies. But go to any third world country, and you can buy a copy of windows for the price of a CD. And with automation and fabrication this is the fate of every good and service that can be automated. When people are fired from their jobs because their jobs can be done by automated systems, the new cost of the goods and services they used to provide is going to be near zero.
Or let’s look at it another way. You get fired from your accountant job. You’re unemployed, and there are no goods and services you can provide that can’t be done cheaper by robots. You’re permanently unemployable. Except, can you scratch the dirt with a stick and put in seeds and harvest them? No you can’t because subsistence farming can be done cheaper by a robot. Except you’re unemployed, so your time is worth nothing! That means you have to be getting your food for free, otherwise it would be worth your while to scratch out a living from the dirt like a Neolithic peasant. It means your clothes have to be free, otherwise you’d be fashioning clothes from scraps and leaves. And on and on.
People who become unemployed today don’t become subsistence farmers because it isn’t worth their while, because there is free food available. They don’t hand-make clothing because their is free, or nearly free mass produced clothing available. It is true that people end up on the streets because we don’t have free or nearly free housing, but in real life people who aren’t mentally ill tend to live with their friends and family rather than camp on the streets. People get all kinds of assistance. People don’t starve in the streets because we have social mechanisms to prevent that. We’re not going to cut social services to the point where people are homeless and starving, because that’s when you get riots and civil unrest, and the cost of providing “the poor” with crusts of bread and rags is actually quite cheap, and will just get cheaper in the future.
In other words, simply picking through the castoffs of the rich will provide a lifestyle better than what people have today. “The Rich” would have to take active steps to deny “The Poor” the goods and services they need to survive. It would require more than not caring about whether the poor live or die, it would require an active desire to kill them. Sure, if the rich create killbots to kill all humans who aren’t part of the oligarchy, or slapbots to slap food out of people’s hands as they try to eat, or rainbots to spray people with water if they try to sit under freeway overpasses while it rains, then we’ve got a dystopia.
Otherwise, we’ve got piles of essentially free goods and services lying around, and automated systems everywhere creating more every second. How that turns into a dystopia is hard for me to understand.
