>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.
You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.
As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?
In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.
This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.
What is the point of producing all this stuff now?
Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.
At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.
I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately got stuff for free.
But, as before, it doesn't really matter as rich people aren't interested in things. They already have everything they could ever dream of and physically cannot handle even more. They are interested in social standing.
By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).
And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.
> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free".
If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make life enjoyable. However, once you become rich, you transcend beyond that — where you cannot ever begin to call all the debt you've accumulated. It's a uniquely rich experience to be able to sit on billions of dollars worth of debt and not think twice about those who owe something.
> If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free
Exactly. In that scenario both the buyer and seller exchange an equal amount of value. No debt lingers to be paid (or never paid, as the case may be) in the future. But Apple wants more. They want you to promise them something else in some hypothetical future.
Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
A debt never called is the same as giving something away for free, yes.
Technically they can still call the debt, but the question remains outstanding: What do you have that they would want in return? The answer is effectively nothing, and increasingly so.
There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.
You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.
You act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more.
Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.