[JoeAltmaier]

This is an example of a beginner approaching the topic of a post-scarcity economy. There's so much more to it than 'people producing wealth'. That's pretty much going away - almost all manufacturing is already automated, and the rest will soon be so.

This puts us all between a rock and a hard place - most of us will be out of a job, and at the same time the factories are in the hands of the folks who built them. So lots of goods available, and no market (few people have any money).

Clearly this is a different world than the 1800's free market system anticipated. So we'll have to change.

[zorga]

> There's so much more to it than 'people producing wealth'. That's pretty much going away - almost all manufacturing is already automated, and the rest will soon be so.

That's not going away, automation doesn't mean people aren't producing wealth, it just means said wealth is produced by fewer people but those robots belong to someone and its output is rightfully theirs. Just because a robot produced something doesn't mean everyone is entitled to it.

> This puts us all between a rock and a hard place - most of us will be out of a job, and at the same time the factories are in the hands of the folks who built them. So lots of goods available, and no market (few people have any money).

This is true.

> Clearly this is a different world than the 1800's free market system anticipated. So we'll have to change.

This is true as well, but that change isn't going to be moving away from capitalism and seizing the labor of the productive to give to the non productive for nothing. The productive will not stand for that and will simply stop producing for others which means no robots and no automation and everyone fending for themselves again. Automation drives down the cost of goods, less work will be require from people to obtain those goods, but those who produce must necessarily have incentive to do so or they won't, and that incentive is wealth and always will be.

[JoeAltmaier]

Strawmen aren't helping here. "The labor of the productive" is becoming a very small set. Clearly they'll have to be motivated differently. Obviously the way forward isn't breaking the system with a hammer, so lets stop going back to that.

Incentive to live is different from incentive to work. Look at open source; look at researchers in universities. Wealth is not the motivator there, yet there's tremendous productivity coming from that.

The meaning of wealth is going to have to change.

[zorga]

> Incentive to live is different from incentive to work.

Incentive to live is the primary but not only incentive to work. Wealth is what you need when you're trying to survive, only after that's achieved do other incentives matters.

> The meaning of wealth is going to have to change.

No, wealth is wealth, it's just stuff, that's not going to change. You need stuff to survive, food, shelter, etc, that's not ever going to change.

What's going to change is how wealth is distributed, that's where the conversation is.