It’s true - but then where do folks get money to buy from the businesses?
Eventually this merry-go-round runs into some issues if we don’t figure out a way to make this huge productivity boom work.
Eventually this merry-go-round runs into some issues if we don’t figure out a way to make this huge productivity boom work.
1) This would make stocks worth a lot more and produce more dividends so everyone owning stock would get money to spend.
2) Governments effectively indirectly own ~40% of all business profits via corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, sales taxes. So governments would also have more revenues to spend/redistribute (this depends on governments not wasting it, spending it on wars etc.)
There's no hard and fast rule that humans need to be involved in the economy, it's just that until recently, you needed to pay them in order to have an economy that worked.
Corporations are legally people; give them enough brains, and they may become a real boy one day.
Now obviously, hell is more likely than a utopia, but this is the sort of advancement that would be required for us to reach that point. Something has to do the work.
That doesn't mean the wheels won't fall off, they fall off pretty regularly as is.
The difference between this loop and the previous loops, is that people making the tech used to be pretty straightforward ("invest in me, your money will let me make a machine that lets me fire 90% of my peasants and we can share in the savings"), while today they're all "invest in me, either this will kill everyone or just make the concept of money irrelevant, either way rotflmao".