…if all labour were to be replaced by autonomous robots. Prices would drop to zero since companies aren’t making or losing money anymore, and money would become worthless.
Those robots require maintenance, which means spare parts and equipment. Making them requires materials, such as metals and plastic. The guy who owns the mine, isn’t going to hand over the metals for free, which means that robot maintenance won’t be free either.
You’ve just described the post-scarcity economy.
I think of the two possible trajectories as the Star Wars universe and the Star Trek universe. Both have fully automated supply chains through droids/replicator technology. However, in Star Wars, only the elite few have access to that technology. Hence, the economy is still centered around trade and, well, as the title would suggest — wars. In Star Trek, that technology is democratized and made available to everyone to create a world in which money has no meaning, and everyone has access to technology and meeting their basic needs.
It all depends on what kind of society we decide to build from here on out.
The Orville has a great take on it too.
There’s an episode where they bring in someone from a scarcity-era planet and she’s freaking out about how they have replicators and future medical tech, and the crew explains to her that if the technology were airdropped on her world, thry wouldn’t be socially ready for it and it would just become a means of further stratification.
Guess i need to watch star trek now
Labor might become worthless, but money would still have value derived from ownership of capital (factories and raw materials). A tiny capitalist class would still produce and sell to each other, while the rest of humanity would be left with literally nothing to work with.
How are companies buying raw materials if there are no consumers to subsidize that?
There are still (some) consumers—other capitalists.
It still doesn’t seem plausible to me because the idea of momey is only sexy in so far as you can trade it for other stuff. There’s not much value in money that can only be used to purchase land/raw materials. It’s just a contract at that point.
If the bourgeois class is adamant about keeping commodification, they probably wouldn’t let things get to this stage in the first place. Governments would step in to regulate.
There’s not much value in money that can only be used to purchase land/raw materials.
On the contrary—with automation converting raw materials to finished goods essentially for free, raw materials would be worth more than ever.
✅ Shower (probably)
❌ Thought
It is a thought though
Can you expand on this thought using a hypothetical supply chain? Land and resources would still hold monetary value even if the value of human labor has been vanquished.
I’m not an economist, but I’ll try to answer you. Yes, land and resources still retain intrinsic usefulness and scarcity, but monetary value depends on a functioning market sustained by human labor and consumption; without those, capitalism loses its underlying mechanism of value creation. For example:
Imagine an AI controlled agricultural system. Robots cultivate land, harvest crops deliver food, etc, all without human labor. If no humans are employed, there are no wages being paid. Without wages, there’s no one with money to buy the food. The owners of the automated farms could produce endlessly, but there would be no market demand in the traditional sense
The system would have to transform to some sort of technofeudalism or socialism.
Feudalism. Which is already about 80% what we have right now. True capitalism is desd
there is a reason the term petrodollar came into use. Without social change it can be disastrous.
*intentionally
