In the future, will technology make it so that everyone is rich? I know the idea of richness is subjective; my definition includes high levels of material consumption as well as control over one’s time (being time rich). Feel free to argue against my definition if desired.
Quite possibly. From the perspective of people in, say, 1614, we’re the future and we’re all rich, at least if you limit yourself to an industrialized country. People we consider poor now are wealthy by the standards of folks in 1614, and the average person is ludicrously wealthy. Much of that wealth - well, really, all of it - is due to technological innovation and generally superior methods of social organization.
Is is quite conceivable people of 2514 will be wealthier still.
And yet we’re not sure if man will be alive just 11 years later.
Or if women can survive.
Yes, on a long enough timeline. A person today can probably have the same standard of living as someone had in the 18th century for a few hundred or less hours of work a year. I’m assuming that trend will continue.
There are issues with resource depletion, where will all the natural resources to let everyone live at western levels come from.
Take any point in history and this is rich - pretty universal education, some sense of opportunity for most, health care, low crime, food and power security, welfare … what do you want, everyone to have a yacht and cruise the Maldives?
We are already rich by 1800s standards. By 2100 we’ll be rich by 2000 standards but not 2100 standards.
Not by a long shot. As long as we are concerned with “fair” resource allocation based (very loosely) on how much one person contributes to the economy compared to others, there will always be homeless, there will always be those on welfare.
With advances in automation there will not be opportunities for anyone to contribute to the economy. There is a meme based on the just world fallacy that says ‘robots are coming, but they are only taking the low skill jobs. People with skill and education will be safe’. That is bunk people tell themselves. The robots will be able to perform virtually all (and most likely all) tasks that require a human by the end of this century. Robots will make better fast food workers, artists, businessmen and physicians than any human could ever hope to become.
At that point, theoretically, we could enter a post scarcity society where everyone is guaranteed a minimum income. In that case people wouldn’t be rich money wise but we’d be rich time wise. But making that happen politically will be a huge challenge. A large, poor unemployed underclass and a rich ownership class is going to cause a lot of problems soon.
(bolding mine)
Sure . . . but frankly I don’t see that happening without violent upheaval. And whether that violent upheaval would actually materialize into a long-term sustainable economic system seems unlikely, human nature being what it is.
[hyperbole-ish]As long as our overlords slavishly worship at the two-headed god of Capitalism and Self-Sufficiency As Moral Imperative, and using its power to maintain their privileged positions, we will never see that world where as a society we choose to let people live moderately comfortable lives without insisting that they “earn” it . . . 'cause that wouldn’t be fair, yaknow?
[/hyperbole-ish]
There are lots of reasons why this timescale is over-optimistic. Lots of tasks that humans are good at are proving extraordinarily difficult for robots to do. This is the so-called Moravec Paradox
Putting it in a very simple soundbite, 'many things that humans find hard to do can be done quite easily by robots and computers, but many things that humans find easy are very difficult to automate". Gradually this paradox may become a thing of the past, but it may take much longer than a century.
But a second, more important circumstance might prevent the post-scarcity economy from materialising in the near future, if ever - the energy cost of such a society. Automation requires energy to function - energy which will become more difficult to come by as this century progresses. Oil, gas, coal and other resources will start to run out, even assuming widespread fracking; we will have to switch to fission, fusion and renewables. None of these technologies are ready to take over from fossil fuels yet.
To have a post-scarcity material economy we need a post-scarcity energy economy - we are a long way from that at the moment.
This is 2014, we have 86 years until 2100. Coal will last for 200 or so years I believe. Also energy demands only go up by about 1-2% a year in the developed world.
Also renewables are coming along fine. Solar power has dropped in price almost 98% in the last 30 years. Wind something like 70%. I can’t find the charts, but prices keep declining. There is enough renewable energy on earth power a hundred (a thousand) earths, we just don’t have the technology to capture it yet but that tech is coming along rapidly.
We can’t really base the energy requirements of a Post-Scarcity society on our current power consumption; we currently use about 17/18 terawatts, but assuming that every human on Earth is the beneficiary of a completely automated economy, our planetary energy use will be at least an order of magnitude greater, perhaps two or three. This would require a very large commitment to renewables, and a worldwide power network as well.
This is all doable in theory, but so many political problems would have to be solved amicably in the meantime that I find it hard to be confident of this outcome.
This.
Even today we are not uniformly richer in all respects than we were in years past – we are overall more comfortable because of technology and industrial productivity, but things that are resource-limited like land and housing are becoming disproportionately more expensive as the population rapidly increases. You just have to look at the cost of a piece of land or desirable housing in proportion to income to see this. Back in the 60s the cost of a nice suburban house might have been on the order of about a year’s salary; today it can be 10x or 15x or more. The average price of a detached house in Toronto last month was $935,122 – that’s average, and includes bad areas and dumps that need major renovation. I still remember a time when any ordinary person could buy a lakeside cottage as a vacation home without undue expense; today, I know a millionaire who regrets that he can’t afford it. As they say, God ain’t making them any more, and the population is still growing.
So I think our lives in the future will be very different than they are now, better in ways that can be enhanced by technology, but worse in ways that are resource-dependent. Maybe instead of getting away to a country cottage for relaxation, or a resort that will be expensive to get to and expensive to stay at, we’ll just put on our virtual-reality suit and sit around in our one-bedroom condo on the 752nd floor of our super-highrise. It’s a world that might be interesting to visit, but I’m not entirely sure I’d really want to live there.
There is a lot of room on this planet, and even if we had a population of ten billion there would still be large regions of wilderness.
But we couldn’t all have limitless wealth; if we each wanted to build one-man spaceships and explore the universe or a giant space habitat each, we would soon hit the limits of available resources. Post-scarcity is not possible if post-scarcity means ignoring all physical limits on materials and energy.
Let’s work on getting middle class, first.
The global average income, adjusted for purchasing power parity, is about $1,480 a month. Not great-- but not horrific. What is horrific is how this is concentrated: 1 out of 3 people on this planet lives on less than $2.00 a day. And you can’t buy a lot anywhere on $2.00 a day.
So yeah, there are lots of people the average Joe from 1800 would consider rich. But also a whole heck of a lot of people that were, and still are, poor as dirt. Being a part of the global middle class (and by that, I mean about $10,000 a year-- enough to afford education, basic healthcare, a calorie-sufficient diet, and basic consumer goods like laundry soap, sanitary pads, stuff like that) is still out of reach for many.
The bar will always be moved (up or down), so even in a Star Trek utopian universe there will still be ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, since you will never eliminate completely hierarchical status. I mean, in Star Trek I don’t think they have money anymore, and you can build everything from nano assembly machines and other sci-fi magic…plus they are at least a type 2 civilization, maybe even bordering on type 3, so resources are no longer even vaguely an issue. Yet Kirk is the captain and the red shirt guys still get send down to the planet wearing those red shirts and knowing what that means. 
What I think will happen, however, is when we finally cross over to being a type 1 civilization resources won’t be an issue anymore (heck, they might not be an issue in 100 or so years…and even all of the damage we are doing wrt global warming might be alleviated through technology for a type 1 civilization), and once you have nano assemblers and manufacturing, something that IS possible and not complete science fiction, the focus on what it means to be ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ will change…as it’s changed in the last 100 years. When everyone is fed, has a home and what are considered the basic services in the Western World, i.e. sanitation, electricity, food, basic medical care, rule of law and other basic infrastructure, then the meaning of what’s ‘poor’ will shift upwards.
There’s more than one kind of resource. I have no doubt that we’ll develop clean energy sources relatively soon, including cleaner fission power and maybe even fusion. But that only means that we’ll stop getting our energy by burning stuff, particularly burning stuff that dumps 100-million-year-old sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, something we should have stopped doing long ago. But all the other resources I talked about above will continue to be scarce and will get scarcer, and as long as we have industrialization serving a burgeoning population we will to some extent continue to pollute the air and water and draw limited resources out of the earth.
This Kardashev scale civilization stuff is pure speculative science fiction that deals only with energy use – it doesn’t solve any of the other resource problems and even so we know of no credible mechanism by which we or any civilization can or ever has gone beyond Type I. It would be great if we could anticipate not only having vast amounts of energy but also vast amounts of everything else we need to live including land, air, water, mineral resources, and just simple living space. But if the population continues to grow and we’re going to be colonizing other planets to achieve this wealth, I’d like somebody to tell me what specific planets we’re going to colonize and how we’re going to do it. I worry when the direct impacts of overpopulation are staring us in the face but the solutions can only be found in Star Trek movies.
At the risk of hijacking yet another thread:
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But all the other resources I talked about above will continue to be scarce and will get scarcer, and as long as we have industrialization serving a burgeoning population we will to some extent continue to pollute the air and water and draw limited resources out of the earth.
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Except that you are misunderstanding the implications of the energy use at the scales I was talking about. Water becomes a non-issue with sufficient power, as do most if not all of the resources you are worried about becoming scarce, since at the point we are a type 1 civilization we will have access to the various asteroids in our solar system…a completely untapped resource that dwarfs anything on earth. NASA is already planning a mission in the 2020’s to capture an asteroid, drag it back to a lunar orbit and send a manned mission up to study it in detail. Doing all of those things is all about energy, and having access to that level of energy is a complete game changer (think about it in terms of earlier civilizations and their own energy budgets compared to that of the Industrial Age, or that of today…it’s a rapid upward progression. And that’s why Kardashev put the scale in terms of energy budgets).
For anyone not familiar with this, here is the wiki on it. I wouldn’t say it’s pure science fiction, but it’s certainly speculation. But since the scale is used quite often I figured I’d use it in this discussion. Again, I think you fail to grasp the implications. Yes, it deals with energy use, but the thing is, when a civilization has access to the levels of energy on the scale it implies a lot about that civilization and it’s capabilities. A civilization that can harness the entire output of a planet (type 1) is going to be able to access resources that are currently either too expensive or simply impossible for us to use…and do so in a much cleaner and more efficient way.
At any rate, I don’t think that in the future everyone will be ‘rich’…but I think that everyone (and by this I mean the global population of the planet) will have a lifestyle that, today would be considered ‘rich’ in many countries today and would be considered comfortable in most Western nations. Assuming we can get past the problems we’ve unleashed like global warming and get past the immediate scarcities wrt our current and future projected populations and get to the point we are a type 1, I think a lot of the problems will fall away. Of course, the trick is getting through the next few hundred years of transition without having the whole thing collapse like a house of cards.
There’s a problem here. Suppose I have two or three years of middle-class US salary. Surely that’s enough to live like a mid-1700’s rich person, right? So where do I go to get my fabulous country estate, army of servants, fields of grain, and on-site smithery, and never actually work again? Last time I checked, land was quite expensive and even maids make minimum wage nowadays. So something doesn’t add up.