Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity

Steel doesn't really have an innate value, the value only comes when you've turned your steel into cars. If someone comes up with really clever way to make the same car using 30% less steel then we've effectively increased the total value of a fixes amount of steel and thus we are no longer looking at a zero-sum game.

Sure in a large enough time scale there are only so many atoms in the universe and you can't fight thermodynamics (we think...), but that kind of argument is really interesting when looking at a practical level and time frame.

I don't care how rich the rich are as long as our systems are set up to guarantee a minimum level of access to basic resources including housing, drinkable water, food, internet access, safety, healthcare and education.

As long as these minimums are guaranteed with a large buffer (and every century the minimums go up) I am fine with the wealthy having a lot of money. In our system, the banks invest that money anyway, when the rich aren't using it. These investments represent belief about future demand -- which may result more and more in a plutocracy. But as long as the rest of humanity lives comfortably, I don't care.

Safety nets produce real choice. They allow you to spend time raising your kids and educating them. The kids can join the new knowledge-based workforce. You can as well, since you can take time off to learn. We can maybe travel to the stars.

But without the basic guarantees (vouchers, single payer based) many people are stuck in dead end jobs or worse, grinding poverty. It's like a poker tournament where most people have a really small stack AND can't afford to fly out of the tournament. So much wasted opportunity for human knowledge.

The other thing is smashing the knowledge silos - patents on drugs etc. The way science and open source grew is that anyone could stand on the shoulders of giants and their contributons added to the growing body of knowledge. That's how you serve the long tail eg cure malaria the same way wikipedia has articles on obscure topics and linux runs on toasters. Public platforms outperform private ones.

To sum up: tax the robots, guarantee the basic safety net, put education online and use colleges for tutoring and certification only, promote patentleft for drugs and open source for software.

This is the beauty of the market - interests are balanced against one another and an equilibrium is reached. If more people want cars than can be built, prices go up and demand goes down. Someone out there finds a way to make cars more cheaply, which reduces per-unit resources costs, allowing more people access to them.

Also, overpopulation is never going to be an issue in the sense that you're considering here. Population growth is inversely correlated to economic success, to the point that developed nations have reproduction rates below that of replacement. As people are raised out of poverty the world's population growth will slow, and if we are successful at eliminating poverty, reverse.

100K years ago, all resources of Europe were barely enough to sustain a few tens of thousands of humans. With agriculture and metal technologies, it went up to a few millions, just because metals, wood or fields were new resources. Industrial revolution meant lots more people could live in cities, because coal were a new resource. Same happened with petrol or uranium in the XXth century: new resources, more people could live better where previous resources were scarce.

We have no reason to think it will be different in the future and we will stop uncovering new resources that will let us live better. In any case, the rate of discovering new resources has done nothing but increase its pace all through history.