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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP, but I think the implication is you can't run a consumer economy if the consumers aren't making any wages to buy the products and services those cheap and efficient robots are churning out. Or pay taxes. So the entire socioeconomic system we currently enjoy/endure vanishes, robotic factories included.

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Right, perhaps true, but my point is that you don’t need a consumer economy if/when you have fully replaced labor with automata.

I agree this would represent the end of the current socioeconomic system, and that many/most would not enjoy the neo-feudalistic-at-best system that would replace it.

The robot factories don’t require consumers as inputs. They don’t necessarily vanish if the consumer economy vanishes. (I agree they would vanish if you tank the economy in, say 2027.)

Exactly. Economy of scale will cease to exists. Thus the demand for robots in the factories will stop making sense - what they would be making for whom? Nobody have money, nobody can buy anything.

So next step, business go bust, because there is just not enough billionaires to keep all of them alive. Another step is states go bust because there is no income to be taxed and there is no capital exchanging hands in buying goods which could be taxed.

There are economic systems which aren't based on the concept of "money".

If you mean bartering, then what people which has been pushed out by AI into uselessness are going to barter?

Not really. "Money" is actually just a middleman that facilitates bartering in new configurations, such as the exchange of goods/services with very different valuations. So there concept is retained.

I mean systems in which there're no expectations of giving something in return for getting something of economic value. That which happens naturally within family.

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