Economic system of the future

[Kidlicious]

If machines can freely provide literally everything every human being ever wanted, then there isn't any economics left.

If machines can completely freely provide the vast majority of stuff that people want, but not all of it, then you'll still see people exchanging services with each other in whatever sectors of the economy remain.

This statement (the latter, I agree with Sava on the first) shows a lack of thinking about how the economy would function from here to there. Producers can't make a profit when prices are falling to zero and everyone already has most of what they need. And how are people suppose to pay the mortgages?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

I mean, you can do that with real chicks too
but they need to be underage mormon cult chicks
and i really can't be arsed to pretend i'm a prophet just for sex and farm labor

if it does not work out here... this is the best advert yet to move to USA :freedom:

[Fake Boris]

it is just a luddite fallacy as it ever was... in a "workless society" the workers would create stuff for each other... from human to human... we would all be artists and entertainers spending time the way we like it, and working on the projects that we think are meaningful, with the life's amenities provided by the capital... in other words we would all be where the "rich" of today living off their capital investment are right now. ... it'd be a lovely world to live in, but we are quite far away from that one.

Never going to happen. Some property is "zero-sum", and people will always want to surpass others by acquiring it.

[Kuciwalker]

Well as long as the competition for the zero-sum good doesn't expend real resources, making it a negative-sum game, so what?

[Aeson]

Perhaps he's referring to things like land and sexy women? Who gets the beach property and who's stuck in Nebraska?

[Tupac Shakur]

Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage.

**** yes. Kill all the lawyers.

[Kidlicious]

Never going to happen. Some property is "zero-sum", and people will always want to surpass others by acquiring it.

As long as we're speculating, maybe people will be different in the future. Or is that just dreaming?

[Dauphin]

Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage.

**** yes. Kill all the lawyers.

My experience of eDiscovery is that it is a great tool for converting millions of pages of **** into thousands of pages of manageable data for review. Cost is reduced, but it has to be otherwise it would be prohibitively expensive. Jobs aren't lost as such, they were never there to begin with.

[Tupac Shakur]

****...

[Hauldren Collider]

Looks like lawyers are here to stay.

[Kuciwalker]

****...

You should have anticipated that. Without knowing the price elasticity of demand, the effect of an increase in lawyers' productivity on their employment is indeterminate.

[Dauphin]

Work expands to fill the amount of client money available.

[Kidlicious]

Blah blah Say's Law blah blah **** blah blah.

[kentonio]

If machines can freely provide literally everything every human being ever wanted, then there isn't any economics left.

Why would anyone spend the time/cost/effort building the robots/factories/suppy chains etc to supply something they aren't going to be paid for? It feels like a catch 22. It couldn't come about until the infrastructure was already in place, but the infrastructure would never be made unless you already had a free society.

[Dauphin]

Why would anyone spend the time/cost/effort building the robots/factories/suppy chains etc to supply something they aren't going to be paid for? It feels like a catch 22. It couldn't come about until the infrastructure was already in place, but the infrastructure would never be made unless you already had a free society.

Open source works ok (i.e. where cost of replication is low).