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I'm probably missing something, but I don't see how driving the marginal cost of human necessities (food, shelter, clothing, health care, education) to zero is anything but a good thing.

Is the world worse off because we have innumerable, self-replicating automated "robots" (plants) which, for free, convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen? Should we prefer a universe where humans must do this themselves? Now what if rice harvested itself and walked to your door every morning? Would that be a bad thing?

My thinking: if we have robot farmers, delivery drivers, tailors, doctors, etc. we've reached the Star Trek universe where the replicator eliminated all scarcity (maybe not with a molecule-by-molecule copies, but a robot which can build anything we need cheaply).

My hidden premise is that people do "work" (labor they don't enjoy) to ensure their survival. There are other issues like status, prestige, satisfaction, etc. but I'm talking about the basic fear of unemployment ("unemployment is bad because you could starve and die").

If the survival cost is 0, then there should be no fear of unemployment. You'd have 100% leisure time for art, study, etc.

I think what you are missing is the in between phase where scarcity still exists, but the best way to produce scarce outputs does not involve humans, besides those who own or run the scarce-output-production entities. This seems to me to either produce societies with wild inequities between a very few producers and a very many do-nothings, or the types of socialist utopias that we appear to be really horrible at as humans. The everyone-has-a-magical-everything-maker phase, I agree, that sounds pretty solid.

"This seems to me to either produce societies with wild inequities between a very few producers and a very many do-nothings"

I would imagine that as the costs of production approach zero, our real life economy will start looking a lot more like the Second Life economy. That is, where everyone is a boutique producer slash experience seeker.

Good point -- thinking out loud, it seems to me that automation would just drop the price of goods.

Imagine Moore's law applied to food and transportation -- wouldn't grocery stores and fedex have to lower their prices to match competitors? Suddenly food becomes cheaper and cheaper, until you can buy a lifetime supply of rice for $5 (unfathomable today, but you can buy a "lifetime supply" of textual data storage for probably the same price).

I mean, there could be collusion and cartels to restrict supply (diamonds), but something as important as food production wouldn't be kept restricted long (food could become a utility).

I think you're operating from the assumption that the fruits of automation will somehow find their way to the population at large. That won't necessarily happen.

It's quite possible that the advantage will go entirely to those who own and manage the businesses that automate their operations. (And indeed, some would say this is happening now.)

If automation reaches its endpoint, where no human labor is necessary, how does capitalism continue to function? What value can members of the public offer in exchange for all the automatically-produced goods and services?

I think if that were to happen, we'd see some kind of major social reorganization. Who knows how that would look? Maybe it would be utopian, and then again maybe it would be some kind of luddite, burn-the-robots-and-hang-the-engineers facism. Who knows.

At first, yes. Computers were a privilege of rich and intellectual elite, at first. But as you can see, technology gets cheaper and cheaper and more accessible to the general public. Even those who do not have any money at all are able to access it through libraries and stuff.

Thanks for the reply. Yep, I'm assuming that the benefits will get shared (which is not guaranteed) but I think capitalism and exising human charity will work. Here's my amateur economic analysis:

If you can supply widgets more cheaply, you can underprice the competition and capture the market (I'm talking more about basic commodities for survival, food, clean water, shelter, etc.). And of course the other companies will compete, have better robots, etc. and you'll have a race to the bottom (this even happens with 'luxury' goods like USB drives). If I can provide aluminum for cheaper, I can flood the market with it (which drives prices down, but I get the profit).

Secondly, we have plenty of charities -- if advanced labor saving devices existed, governments and others would funnel exising funds to acquire them and put them to use. Why pay for food stamps when you can give everyone their daily bread?

I think capitalism based on survival would eventually have to phase itself out -- it would move to virtual currency where people traded currency for optional goods/services they couldn't acquire with the machines (handcrafted xyz, live concert tickets, etc.).

I may really be on this plant thing, but I imagine a world where, at minimum, we get food/water "for free" from the tireless robotic background workers (like air) and everything else is based on human interest. I think humans have enough demonstrated charity to donate something like that once developed.

But, I think the bigger threat is this: a world where robots are advanced enough to provide everything is probably one where a sufficiently powerful country could take over everything.

> Widespread, permanent unemployment is one of the less favorable possible outcomes.

Wondering why you think this is a less favorable outcome - presumably if there were robots that could make all our whims come true it would be closer to a utopian society. The value of "employment" for itself seems nonsensical - the ability to procure things that people want seem to be the better barometer of a society's wealth.

These reminded me of structural unemployment[1] effects I've learnt on history classes, that happened during the first industrial revolution.

However, PG published an essay[2] from Knuth that mentioned:

... because their aim is to create machines that write programs better than we can, given only the problem specification.

In this sense we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

Which seems to be pretty much corroborated by your TL; DNR

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_unemployment

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html

What a great article! I have similar ideas to those thinkers (Brain and Ford), but I've been inspired mostly by reading way too much science fiction! Feels great to learn I'm not just simply crazy.

Well, to take another example, we don't use horses for labor anymore...Some part of the labor force -has- been replaced.

Just out of curiosity, what happened to all the horses that were left without jobs?

Robots arent doing most of the work americans used to -- people oversees are.

Actually this is false. As the graph in the article shows American manufacturing output is much higher now than it was in the past. This is due to automation and a smarter, more empowered work force.

While American jobs for simple, brute force manufacturing were outsourced, high end manufacturing for complicated things like Tractors and earth moving equipment are now essentially power assisted with automation backing or managing human output.