Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

If you permit me to reference the blog post:

>It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background.

You're making an implicit assumption that all land is owned by people who want to deprive you of the land and its products. You can't make the argument that a "rich person" is holding onto the land and eating all of the food produced by it, so it would be unfair for the "rich person" to give you access to the food.

The underlying problem here is access to land and this is an independent concern from "The Economy".

>Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.

Ok so you mentioned it, but this means we are no longer talking about the machines. In fact the presence or absence of machines is a completely irrelevant factor here. If you can get your hands on the machines, it turns into a non issue.

And as mentioned above, if you are exclusively producing for yourself, you don't need that much land, hence the people without land are in the right if they demand to get some of it. The very argument you made is that the people with the machines are better stewards of the land, but this logic only makes sense in the presence of them producing for an outside consumer. If they just hold onto the land and do nothing with it, their hypothetical productivity increase is worth nothing compared to the very real zero yield they produce by doing nothing. Even an inefficient production process has higher absolute productivity than doing nothing.

Take it one step further. From the perspective of the low productivity producers the land is very valuable and from the perspective of the high productivity autark producer, the land is worth very little. If the autark producer wants to role play a feudalist and puts an army of killer robots there, he would be expending a lot of resources for something that the producer doesn't consider valuable. Since the low productivity producers consider the land more valuable, their military budget per acre is actually higher.

So now the second underlying assumption is that the landless people are defeated by the robot army of the landed people. I hope you see where this is going. It's not about economics at this point anymore. It's some weird power fantasy where some group of people always wins and another group of people always loses.

Other animals are capable of some tasks, like dogs searching for drugs, bombs or people, or helping the blind. Most animals however are kept for their bodies: meat, milk, egg, fur, skin.

The movie Matrix explores this idea, humans are kept alive for their bodies. They are not kept in constant suffering at least, as we do with many animals.

100%. Most people can be very happy with very low consumption. What people want is not to work. The happiest time in my life was when I was earning a measily $40K per year in passive income from crypto and didn't work. It was the lowest salary I ever had, least I ever consumed and happiest I'd ever been. The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. If you don't work, you don't need to consume anywhere near as much. When my wife quit her job 10 years ago, our rate of savings stayed the same because we spent less and quality of life went up significantly for both of us.

Anyone who enjoys working is delusional. What they call work is not work; they're living in a parallel reality where the economy rewards them for playing the big boss and sitting on their asses and watching their money compound... Everything they're doing is meaningless; it only serves as a narrative device to justify the handouts that they'd be getting regardless. Just look at Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; he probably made more money after he resigned from the CEO role. It's incredible really when you look at Microsoft's product offerings these days; even Bill Gates knew to dump MSFT and now has less money than Ballmer. It's like the economy punishes people for having common sense.

I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.

I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.

Unless the overlords are willing to implement UBI, they can't realistically cut 50% of the workforce from the economy and survive the transition.