(06-28-2011, 08:21 PM)--Pete Wrote: If not enough people can afford the products, then less products will be made. The cost of making fewer products will increase the cost of the products (the opposite of economy of scale), leaving yet fewer people able to afford the products. That spirals down into stasis.
You can't decrease prices so much that prices increase. All prices are relative. Whatever is left for humans to do, will be incredibly valuable (measured in robot-produced goods) because it's all we have to do. There is no external measure of value, no economic deity tallying up use values.*
Think of things we get for free, or nearly free - Sunlight is one of the most valuable things we have. If we stopped having sunlight, we would all be impoverished (or dead) and have to devote enormous effort to produce warmth and light. But nobody sits around mourning the fact that we have driven the artificial sunlight workers out of their jobs. If a resource is cheap and plentiful, that's good, not bad. We simply work at producing something else, and the exchange value of those things is so much the higher.
Quote:How will the vast majority of people, incapable of getting the top end jobs because of their mental limitations and not lucky enough to get a bottom end job, get any income to buy any products at all?
If they have absolutely nothing better to do, then they can make old products the old way, by hand, and sell them for pennies. And since the new economy is so ludicrously productive, those pennies will buy them their goods. It is no different from very poor countries today - there is technology, but they do not have it, and so they make what they can with what they have.
Quote:Not quite. There is still the question of raw materials. I once told a friend I was going to build a telescope from scratch. He smiled and pointed out it would take a while. A few billion years after the big bang I would have to cause before enough stars had gone supernova to give me workable amounts of silicon, oxygen, iron, copper, etc. for my truly raw materials.
Agreed, although space is *big*. I once got into an argument with a fellow economic historian over that. Some people seem to have difficulty understanding that what we think of as "raw materials" are the products of stellar processes, not some inherent "stuff" arbitrarily lying around. We are just another process for using loose energy to convert one form of starstuff into another.
Quote:No one, except present CEOs and members of the board, will notice any difference.
Meet the roboboss, same as the old boss.
-Jester
*Unless, of course, we create something that has its *own* values. In which case we could be well and truly fracked (to put it precisely.)