[colechristensen]

There's a rough transition, but eventually we'll get to the point that everything is so cheap that people will produce it for fun, not profit.

Think of how much free open source labor there is, people working together to produce software on their own free time because they like to do it. I see much of the future economy functioning like this, but it only can when automation reaches a level where people can produce enough having fun.

If everyone can purchase a small factory that lives in a room which can built copies of itself, large portions of the economy disappear which is excellent. It could turn most of the economy into small local barter-economies where people did what they wanted and exchanged the outputs with other specialists in their area. (There have been and still are local economies that still function very much like this at least to a degree)

For it to work you have to remove scarcity which is what automation does. Switching from one to the other will be awkward, but it will work eventually.

This is quite a lot like what Marx thought would happen, he was just wrong in his estimation of how effective 19th century automation was going to be.

[MustrumRidcully]

Thanks for the sci-fi, but you underestimate the scarcity of other things : land and natural ressources.