[estearum]

Every year, fewer and fewer people are capable of doing jobs that robots cannot do. That's sort of the whole conundrum here.

"Robots" broadly defined are getting more capable and more intelligent at a significantly faster rate than humans are.

This obviously produces incredible economic surplus, but 1) that surplus is naturally captured by the owners of those robots and not the people they replaced, and 2) doesn't seem clear that all the negative consequences of mass obsolescence are solvable by economic surplus even in theory.

[bcjdjsndon]

Search "Humans are becoming horses" by CGP grey. He's making the exact same point as you except his is 15 years old and still hasn't passed.

I ask you to follow your premise to it's conclusion... who's paying for it these robots and who buys the stuff the robots make? Other robots?? In this world where robot serves robot, where exactly did we disappear to?

[estearum]

If you want to see what just productivity improvements (with no social innovations) naturally does, you can go read about the Gilded Age. Productivity improvements are necessary but not sufficient to enhance human wellbeing. Productivity improvements by themselves appear to simultaneously suppress quality of life for those below the productivity and/or capital ownership bar while increasing quality for those above it.

Yes, an economy is perfectly capable of orienting itself around satisfying the wants of the few people who have a lot of capital at the expense of the many who have little capital. Why wouldn't this be possible?

It obviously creates systemic risk in the economy, which is one of many reasons it should be mitigated by policy and taxation, but I'm not sure why you're acting like it's some mathematical impossibility.

Not sure anyone said anything about humans "disappearing," just driven to extreme economic hardship despite ample overall productivity, which again we have literally hundreds of real world examples of throughout history.

[bcjdjsndon]

> Not sure anyone said anything about humans "disappearing," just driven to extreme economic hardship despite ample overall productivity,

Just answer my question, who's buying all the stuff the robots are making when everyones "driven to extreme economic hardship"?

[estearum]

Again with a strawman. You should consider engaging with the arguments people are actually making, and not the silly versions you make up in your head.

No one said "everyone" is being driven to extreme economic hardship. Without that word, your implication doesn't quite work :)

Here's a rephrasing of your question using the dynamic that I actually described. Let me know if you still need me to fill in the blanks for you:

> when automated systems owned by fewer and fewer people are responsible for greater and greater proportions of economic surplus, who buys the output of those systems?

Do you need help answering that question still?

[bcjdjsndon]

You can't answer it can you? A simple rebuttal to this dystopian future you present, where robots do everything and somehow make a few people rich, but at the same time the economy is fine despite nobody having any actual money to spend.... Make it make sense, you do you, just sayin

[estearum]

Ah it appears you do need some help.

In such a scenario there are two sources of consumption: a very large low-income base and a very small high-income sliver.

This is exactly what we saw during the Middle Ages (until concluded by the Black Death and broad peasant revolts), early Modernity (until concluded by economically motivated political revolutions all over the world), and the Gilded Age (until concluded by an economic collapse followed by broad social reforms).

It's hilarious that you're just asserting the impossibility of something we have literally actually seen play out dozens of times all over the globe over thousands of years.

Productivity improvements → extreme wealth inequality → economic, political, or social collapse → repeat

The more advanced the technology and the markets in which it performs (by definition) the more levered and rapid the productivity gains are, the more extreme the inequality produced -- again as we're seeing play out in real time (https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...)

The smug implication of "well that obviously wouldn't be stable!" is actually not a rebuttal to "this process will produce instability." It's clear you're working in reverse from, "this would be inconvenient if true" to "therefore it cannot be true." But history and current trajectory shows us unambiguously: it is.