[marcosdumay]

> As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.

I'm sorry. You are claiming that the poor will buy job-alternatives from the market once they don't have a job to sustain themselves?

You seem to be missing a slight power imbalance.

[Teever]

If you could get your hands on a humanoid robot that was capable of repairing itself and with enough time and resources the ability to do full self replication by building up the necessary infrastructure to produce it's raw parts, what is the first thing you would do with it?

I'll tell you what I'd do with it.

I'd ask that genie for more wishes and have it start making copies.

[waynesonfire]

It'll be too expensive, you wont have access to affortable resources.

[Teever]

You expect the cost of a self replicating object to remain out of reach of the average person?

Why don't you think it would follow the same cost curve as integrated circuits?

[sangnoir]

> You expect the cost of a self replicating object to remain out of reach of the average person?

Yes. What's the cost of relocating software, or a movie, or an audio file? Very close to 0 (a few cents at most), and yet observe how much our current system prices each of those items. Capitalism, as practiced today, maximizes profits, not competition, I don't see that changing any time soon

[comex]

And yet none of those items are out of reach of the average person. On the contrary, they’re usually pretty cheap. Precisely because replication costs nothing, the strategy that maximizes profit is to maximize the number of copies sold rather than the amount earned per copy.

You can see similar effects in hardware too, since even without self-replication there are already massive economies of scale. How much does it cost to get access to the output of most advanced chip fabrication technology on the planet? The answer is whatever the price of the latest flagship smartphone is.

[sangnoir]

> And yet none of those items are out of reach of the average person

Average person - not average American or individual from developed countries. I know of software that's well out of reach of even the average American.

> The answer is whatever the price of the latest flagship smartphone is.

Therein lies the problem with the assertion that prices will inevitably driven downwards: the price of a flagship phone is not driven by cost of making it - instead the OEMs select a price-point first and then work backwards from there. When was the last time the price of a flagship smartphone series decreased? Compare this to the number of times has it increased.

[svara]

Not really, no.

First:

Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.

If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

Second:

The aggregated desire of billions of people is a formidable force. Whoever finds a way to satisfy it will have found a way to become incredibly wealthy.

[lesuorac]

> Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.

I hear this quite often but I don't think it's true. I don't think we've quite hit the stopping point yet for consumption but I mean you give somebody 2 Yachts and they'll probably try to sell both of them and bank most of that money. Like ask yourself what'd you do with a 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B, 10B windfall? Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself (possible save it in a rainy day fund but w/e; consumption stops).

Of course you give everybody 10M right now it'll cause massive inflation as there isn't enough stuff actually being produced. However, GDP (adjusted for inflation) has been increasing so at some point we'll make more stuff than one can reasonable consume and at that point it'll probably be Wall-E world. However, we are talking about a windfall of 10M which is 151x the US GDP/Capita so assuming current rate of growth remains linear it'll take another 250 years for the Real GDP/Capita to be 10M (~1k in 1790 [1] to ~66k in 2023 => 151 / 66 ~= 2.5).

> If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create. So if energy becomes significantly cheap in the future I'd expect a lot of new goods to be cheaper than today's goods (which also makes it easier for everybody's consumption to go up). Of course many goods are sold by few suppliers and monopoly pricing reflects the value perceived by the consumer so there's a giant wrench.

[1]: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php

[svara]

> Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself

Only for a limited definition of "spending on myself". Self actualization is where desire truly is boundless. 10B is not a lot of money if your goal in life is now to end malaria or build a city on Mars.

Another issue with your thought experiment is that you're now relatively rich. If in some distant future you have the purchasing power of a billionaire of today without being relatively rich, many people will be looking for new ways of outdoing each other.

Of course, consuming zero cost goods is not a measure of wealth, so they'll be consuming whatever isn't zero cost then.

> I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create.

I don't. The price of physical energy fluctuates with how difficult it is for humans to tap it.

I prefer the mental model that the price reflects the human difficulty - perseverance, pain, time, intelligence, physical force, ... - required to provide something.