[narrator]

The robot will properly buy futures contracts so that the borrower will be insulated from any food price fluctuations. If the numbers don't add up the lender will not make the loan. There will not be any "overproduction". The robots will instead recommend another line of business where the robots production will be profitable given the price of market futures for those products.

I have an American friend who lives in Argentina who works online. The cost of living is such that he can work two months and pay his living expenses for two years. Those horribly low prices in Argentina are totally killing him. Not!

So what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?

This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving.

BTW, The novella "Manna" by Marshall Brain is kind of a good take on the future with robots and everything, though I don't really like his "happy" future.

BTW, thanks for giving me a hard time on this. I am getting to the point where this is going to be a bit of a manifesto and you're helping me flesh things out.

[gloverkcn]

I'll be interested to see if any manifesto can plot a path through societies looming issues. I don't see a scenario where we can maintain our current style of capitalism without things breaking down in one way or another.

You're friend in Argentina:

* has the ability to get a job from home, which means it's probably a tech/outsourcing job in a first world country. That doesn't take care of 95% of the population. That doesn't fix the issues.

* In the robot scenario where robots are smart enough to understand markets/futures and can decide a completely different line of work, and then do that work, those remote jobs are gone. Your friend is out of work. He doesn't get a robot.

* the company that hires him has to compete for resources in their country of origin. Their local pay requirements determine what they think a "good deal" on labor is. That country would have robots as well and their wages would crater. Again your friend's cush life would disappear, unless he could buy a robot.

>what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?

Now you are getting to the root of the issue.

We produce enough food in the US that nobody should go hungry, yet we have swaths of kids that don't know where their next meal is coming from.

We have enough abandoned houses that nobody should be homeless, but people still live on the streets.

In capitalism, a private person/entity produces and someone else has to PAY to use what's produced. The issue isn't that there won't be enough to go around. The issue is that our current system will allow lots of people to starve and do without even when there is excess.

You used the term libertarian. That might be why you're getting all the push back. Maybe I'm misinformed on the topic. Libertarians believe an unregulated market and human morality will make everything better. Those two things combined gave us the triangle trade, raw goods (America) --> manufactured goods (Europe) --> slaves (Africe). We also got child labor, poisonous food being sold, no education, life threatening work conditions, etc.

>This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving

Being against this strategy is the antithesis of capitalism. If I give away food, prices drop. If I reduce the supply then prices will go up.

During the great depression, prices dropped so low that all farmers were going to go bankrupt. Farmers themselves were dumping crops and rioting to keep crops off the market to try and increase prices. Farmers were marching on courts because they were demanding that foreclosures stop.

If you let farmers flood the market with goods (lowering prices), while allowing them to refuse to pay their debts, then what kind of economy do you have? It's not capitalism.

My concern is that the coming wave of automation will recreate the great depression x10. The population at large doesn't see it coming, and maybe I'm a chicken little. 30% of the US population think poor people are just lazy, and that if they just worked harder they'd be better off.

When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.

[JBlue42]

>When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.

This is what I keep harping on with folks. I think automation will hit and hit hard and our current economic/political structures are not ready for it or won't be able to adapt fast enough (hence your depressionx10 or just a massive inequality gap).

We already have 'more productive' economies but we have stagnant wage growth, increasing rental/housing costs due to people leaving for cities since there are little/no economic prospects in rural areas now, and, as you said, logistical problems in fulfilling basic necessities. Not to mention mental models that say that these 'unemployed' folks are bad and should just retrain/go to bootcamp/move elsewhere.

Consumption-wise, we can buy whatever we want. Shitty food is cheap, electronics, etc, all cheap. But some of the base foundations in Maslow's hierarchy don't come very cheap anymore and it's harder and harder to get to the higher reaches.

[narrator]

To address your points:

* My friend is not a rockstar programmer. He's about average, and in San Francisco he was living in Bayview and getting his house and his car regularly broken into and barely scraping by. Now he lives like he makes 5x the money he did in SF and his taxes are vastly lower since he's making less money, but living better. This is one of the largest mysteries of modern capitalism. Why are the prices for things so vastly different in different countries?

* If the robots can run the futures market and do general purpose programming then we probably won't even need money because we will have perfected central planning. Instead the robots will be playing a game called "The Humans" which is like when we play "The Sims" with the goal of trying to make the Humans happy. This will go on at a superhuman level of intellect and we won't even be able to analyze what the heck is going on, much like we can't really know why Alpha Go makes the moves it makes. We just won't turn it off because we can't live without it. This is the good or bad future depending on the ultimate fitness function, which in the good future is make everybody happy and not where the fitness future is based on deep ecology (DE) [1] which would prefer a 95% population reduction.

* My friend might not be a web developer, but he could probably get a job working on designing some guy's Burning Man float who owned a robot for enough to live well since it would require an absolutely trivial amount of effort to live since there would be so much supply.

* As far as Libertarianism goes, your formulation seems to be that that means no rules. No not really. I don't think ANY libertarian that is respected by the libertarian community would think slavery or poisoning people should be legal so you really have got a strawman there. Besides if we had no rules at all the wealthy Deep Ecology people could get together and decide they wanted to exterminate everybody they don't need to maintain things with killer robots who unlike in the movies have perfect aim and tactical strategy.

* The foreclosures during the great depression were due to collapse of bank reserves due to fractional reserve banking. You had short panics in the 19th century before the fed and fractional reserve banking, but not depression like scenarios of rapid credit contraction as the money multiplier work in reverse. This is unfortunately a very very deep rabbit hole side issue that requires a 30 page essay to get through. In China, which is probably more capitalist than the U.S, they have a different system. They have tons of companies that have bad debts and the government prints money out of thin air to selectively bail them out without austerity forced on the taxpayer, which is why they haven't had a credit crunch that has predicted every year for the last 30 years.

* The happy path of the future AI automation is normal people get access to these robots and use them to produce unlimited prosperity. The bloody path is only the elite get access and they decide to wipe out everyone else with killer robots because they find them to be irritating useless eaters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology#Development