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Originally Posted by redpoint5
The price of anything is mostly to do with the amount of human time and effort put into it. With robot automation replacing human effort, and possibly robots making robots, we trend towards zero marginal cost. Stuff will cost next to nothing. When things cost next to nothing, the limits for resource consumption are removed.
The problem will be that we'll be so "rich" that resources are rapidly depleted. That's already an issue with current levels of automation.
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Pricing will trend toward the cost of energy, materials, hardware and design time. Which it already has for factory farming and clothing so food will not go much lower since these have been almost fully mechanized with super cheap fossil fuel energy for decades and/ or have shifted to locations where whatever humans are involved get paid next to nothing. AI will now begin to replace engineers and designers.
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So this also implies earnings potential for laborers will approach zero. We will (already) need a whole new way of distributing wealth or the "owners" of the robots (big corporations) will have all of the money and the people will have none. Already happening.
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The bottom 90% of people in OECD countries have less wealth now than they did in 2000. All gains in GDP plus a little go to the top 10%. And most goes to the top 1% which now owns 40% of the wealth.
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Jump to t=229 to skip to the sledgehammer.
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https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?t=229
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