The consumer driven economy is for people who don't naturally automate things

>1,2,3

Yup, except why do the developers not get the income? Presumably they are selling the machines?

>4

Yes. The key with this kind of logic is to relate it to the current situation, though; people with more workers can afford even more workers. Why doesn't it all blow up now?

There is more to success than simply scale of manufacturing capability; firms need to keep ahead of competitors, keep up with technology, manage the whole stack, etc, and then they can end up controlling the whole market (at the thing they do) and having nowhere else to go because the firms in other fields have an advantage that takes something special to beat.

Also, the neat thing about capitalism is that money to buy more work is rarely the bottleneck, because you can get a capitalist to invest in your scheme (if it looks any good).

>5

The second thing (poor get poorer) does not necessarily follow. Only the people who can't do anything that machines can't do better get poor. The working poor have more buying power because the machines create more wealth for less money.

In practice, despite a lot of automation, we don't have many people unable to do anything productive; people are very much more versatile than machines (for now).

More on that: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...

>In the future (my crazy thoughts):

Yes, eventually the set of people who cannot do something that machines can't do better includes everyone, and everyone becomes unemployed. (Which looks pretty good, IMO; who likes working?). There are more serious problems than unemployment at this point, though.

At this point, why do you expect the machines to still be under the control of the capitalists? If the machines can do capitalism, etc better than capitalists, any wealth that ends up in the hands of an autonomous machine will eventually increase to eclipse the human capitalists as well. (And of course, meanwhile the machines are increasing in effectiveness because they are better at machine design as well).

This is called the "intelligence explosion" or "technological singularity" scenario, depending who you ask, and looks like bad news, unless we do some serious stuff to make sure the machines work to specifically benefit humanity instead of just continuing to find better and better ways to do whatever other task they were doing. (Better ways that eventually include overpowering humans militarily and melting us down for raw material).

If you want more info: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/

>5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.

I'm going to go ahead and call you on that one. What you probably mean is that rich people will get a lot richer comparatively. There will be a wider gap on paper.

Those same machines have a tendency to make that paper gap more meaningless as time goes on. Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Even the poorest people in developed countries live lives unimaginable to the rich of the past.

The question is: Would you rather be a poor man in a rich society or a rich man in a poor one?

This isn't to say that we don't need a better token of societal value than "an hour of labor" to face our own strange future, but I don't subscribe to the "Elysium" point of view.

When you assume the outcome, of course it's inevitable.

But consider: machines are still dumb. At the end of the day, someone automates the process.

If all work that is necessary for the function of life can be automated, how wonderful! But, consider the dishwasher. It saves time, but is often misused by dirty dishes going in without pre rinse and disposal. So technically the work has been automated, but parts of the work still require manual operation. But now we pay people to pre wash instead of wash.

The thing that most people miss is that the majority of the world doesn't operate the way the US does (including things like food production). You have to look at the system as a whole. And it is extremely destructive and inhospitable when you evaluate it objectively and holistically.

I know that the popular world-view for internet technologists is very different from that of course. I saw the Hans Rosling TED talk. I used to share the same rose-colored worldview. I also used to believe all of the propaganda put out on television.

I now know that the world we live is far more violent and dysfunctional than we are led to believe. We have very deep structural problems starting with a Social Darwinistic worldview that leads to massive inequality and waste. I believe that technology is working rather directly against all of those negative legacy factors.

And I also believe that technology is currently improving the situation and will continue to do so as things like ultra-local food and energy production aided by nanotechnology become mainstream. I also think that within about twenty years unaugmented humanity will be obsoleted by advanced, vastly superior AI, and that will eliminate the current severe problems with worldviews and social structures holding back technological advancement. I am a little worried we might run into World War III before we get those things online though.

Maybe, as some people suggest, we need to redefine the nature of currency using social and environmental welfare as factors? The problem is, SWIFT, SIX Interbank Clearing and the ISO don't support this, banks don't support this, and national governments don't support this. Instead, IMHO, they pay it just enough lip service (eg. carbon credits) to keep it from having a truly fair go. With the technology we have available today, alternate and more broadly informed currencies are entirely feasible as potential instruments of trade for large portions of the economy, at least in the developed world. The kicker is, it will detract from nationalism, and governments have a PR problem with taxing the facilitation of social or environmental good.