Well, they could always start trading with each other - cutting us slow, dim-witted, lumps of meat of the system entirely - Charlie Stross gave a view of that with the Vile Offspring from Accelerando:
Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo.
Personally, I'm hoping that in the long term we end up with something like a technologically plausible version of something like the Culture (i.e. the Culture's combination of AI and biologicals existing in harmony), or at least the ending of Elysium.
I'm not sure a capitalist system makes sense in a techno-utopia. If the robots make themselves, mine the minerals, smelt the ores, assemble the smartphones, and deliver them to me, there is not a labor cost associated with assembling the smartphone, so why should there be a price?
Maybe the "cost" comes from the loss of the mineral in the ground, but if we're going full on techno-utopia the robots would reclaim the mineral through recycling, so does it become negligible?
Marx touched on the paradoxical nature of automation and advanced technology: "Though machinery be the most potent means for increasing the productivity of labour, that is to say for reducing the amount of labour time necessary for the production of a commodity, in the hands of capital it becomes the most powerful means... for lengthening the working day far beyond the bounds imposed by nature"
Companies don't automate to reduce potential profits, though, but to reduce the cost and inefficiency of human labor. Presumably, even with a fully automated infrastructure, there would still be a human-run corporation at the top, otherwise why would they bother creating the system at all?
But then I may simply not have gone far enough down the rabbithole in my conception of 'techno-utopia.' If the automation is truly self-sustaining and self-contained, in essence, a complete AI economy in and of itself, then perhaps the "cost" comes in the burden of including humans at all?
> Presumably, even with a fully automated infrastructure, there would still be a human-run corporation at the top, otherwise why would they bother creating the system at all?
IMO you're looking at the system before it reaches an endgame.
Investing in automation is a rational decision to reduce costs & increase profits, so companies are going to make that choice. As automations continue to improve more and more jobs will be eliminated in order to continue increasing profits.
But as jobs are eliminated the people that used to do the jobs are still there - still wanting to earn money to feed and clothe their families. And as they don't have jobs, they don't have money, so corporate profits begin to suffer.
The system will eventually reach a tipping point. I just hope we end on the side of "we run the machines and distribute their output for the good of the people" rather than "we run the machines, keep their output, and give the people worthless scrip".
>If the automation is truly self-sustaining and self-contained, in essence, a complete AI economy in and of itself, then perhaps the "cost" comes in the burden of including humans at all?
Hopefully our robot overlords would see it as an opportunity, rather than a cost.
I think that art would remain the thing that humans alone can produce - good tasting food (the production can be automated, but not generating a recipe) - music - entertainment...
In my theoretical future, capitalism will still exist, and we'll still trade and buy things from one another, we just won't need to do so for our basic needs, only for our entertainment desires...
I'm pretty sure Zakalwe asks Sma in Use of Weapons what the humans in the Culture are for - given that the machines are so much better than humans at pretty much everything - the answer is essentially "for having fun".
Table 1
U.S. Equine Population During
Mechanization of Agriculture and Transportation
Year Number of Horses and Mules
1900 21,531,635
1905 22,077,000
1910 24,042,882
1915 26,493,000
1920 25,199,552
1925 22,081,520
1930 18,885,856
1935 16,676,000
1940 13,931,531
1945 11,629,000
1950 7,604,000
1955 4,309,000
1960 3,089,000
If we ever end up really asking ourselves this question it means that capitalism has been running for too long; that it grew into an entity that serves its own goals rather than ours. By that time it might be too hard to slay that particular beast though.
He didn't say so explicitly, but the horse-count is typically used in relation to this point:
What happens when the value of your work falls below the cost of subsistence? In the case of the horses, once feeding them was no longer worthwhile, the answer was simple: They didn't.
Hopefully we won't do anything similar for humans. It would be the most horrendous eugenics program of all time.
This is the pretty much the stated goal of "austerity" benefits cuts. It's already starting to have the effect in the UK of disabled people starving or freezing to death due to not being able to afford to carry on living. So far in small numbers ...
I am not sure this is an helpful response but you have plenty of countries where a small oligarchy controls an enormous share of the GDP and most of the population is dirt poor. I can't remember the reference offhand but there was an African country where the personal budget of the head of state was something like 20 or 30% of the total state expenditure.
Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
Personally, I'm hoping that in the long term we end up with something like a technologically plausible version of something like the Culture (i.e. the Culture's combination of AI and biologicals existing in harmony), or at least the ending of Elysium.