[lotsofmangos]

At some point you get a small amount of very rich people with a large pile of very cheap stuff that they cannot sell as nobody else has any money and even if they did, the marginal cost of producing the stuff is less than the cost of running a market to sell it in.

[1457389]

This is around when they start giving it away, in the hope that the enhanced livelihoods they generate frees the next generation of entrepreneurs to create even better uses for their capital.

At some point we get The Culture. Or so the hopeful prognosis goes...

[girvo]

> At some point we get The Culture

Having recently read the entire series, I'm of two minds when it comes to that scenario. Part of me thinks that it can't come fast enough, but the other part knows that without faster than light travel it's nearly impossible; without a way of gaining more space to live in, pressures on living space will become the source of our conflict even if the capitalist economy as we know it today has broken down...

[dllthomas]

That assumes we keep growing at O(n^3). Certainly we're doing that now, and may well continue, but it's not clear to me that it's guaranteed. Certainly there are places where the birth rate is below replacement.

[CalRobert]

What's to stop them from selling it to each other? Could we see a completely stratified economy, with rich people selling each other the fruits of their automated factories' labour?

[patrickk]

> What's to stop them from selling it to each other?

Nothing. This is what we call luxury goods.

> Could we see a completely stratified economy, with rich people selling each other the fruits of their automated factories' labour?

Already exists to an extent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hourglass_economy. (strong high and low ends to the market and hollowed out middle.)

There's challenges: high-end luxury goods that are totally mass produced don't tend to go together, as it feels too "mass market" or low quality (Ferraris have hand sewn leather in the seats, so they are high quality/"feel authentic"). Apple combines mass production with high end pricing/high quality successfully, but they seem to be an outlier to an extent.

The number of ultra high end consumers is by definition quite small, so there's considerations if a company or brand wants to grow beyond the high end of the market.

[VLM]

You've described feudalism / serfdom with the sole exception that their "factories" were staffed with what boils down to slaves rather than robots.

It wasn't a paradise for the psuedo-slaves, doesn't matter if you call them serfs or not.

One interesting aspect to think about is if 0.1% of the population owns everything and all they do is trade the output of their factories, they won't have much use for almost all of the worlds land and no interest in almost all of the worlds population. They'll really like the worlds resources until technology makes that irrelevant due to solar or fusion or refining everything out of the ocean or nano-assemblers or whatever.

By analogy, in plains grassland regions, for centuries your worth as a human and a measure of your power was the number of horses you owned. Now, almost nobody owns horses and nobody cares how many horses the hobbyists own other than a small separate distinct subculture of horse people. I had a professor and have a cousin who are horse people, its a respectable, time consuming, mostly harmless, expensive hobby that no longer determines your worth as a human being or worth as a leader or your power over other humans. Anyway the analogy with capital is obvious. When you don't need capital anymore, its worthless other than to tiny subcultures of hobbyists. Very soon, collecting capital will be like collection kerosene lamps, or at most its like collecting antique furniture. People who are into it will be deeply into it and hyper competitive amongst themselves with all kinds of crazy ways to keep score and dominate each other and 99% of the population simply won't care and won't participate. Its vital to realize that most hobbies used to be someones business model, their income stream, their way of life, the millstone around their necks, the core of the economy. Now they're just something eccentric people do instead of watching "Survivor" on the couch like a good American would do. And thats the inevitable future of capitalism. As an eccentricity, I think capitalism might be an OK hobby for the occasional weirdo in a post-capitalist world.

Need to find a way to feed ourselves, organize ourselves, and trade human services among ourselves without capital although with a currency of some sort, because none of us will have any capital at all other than the weirdo hobbyists still into that ancient stuff. So... self replicating solar powered factories that make self contained solar powered hydroponics gardens, like a futuristic makerbot squirting out a futuristic aerogarden, and I trade bitcoins with friends on poker night or for arts/crafts or services.

To some extent you see this already. What does SV care about developers outside SV? Oh nothing you say? Well then, its already happening. What do neocons say about people who are permanently no longer part of todays economy? They don't care at all? Well then. They're not evil, just don't care. Like asking the horse people I know how important jet-ski's are to them, what do you think they're going to say? Everyone else is cool with that, at least as long as they still have bread and circuses and a roof of some sort over their heads, and none of that is going to require capital anymore, which is good, because none of us will have capital anymore, either by choice or not.

[CalRobert]

Interesting writeup. I worry that the transition may be more violent. Will those who are driven to have everything be happy if anyone else has anything? I don't know. What makes some people who have tens of millions hunger for billions? I only posed the question because I'm curious what other people's thoughts were; I think we need a fundamental shift in how we allocate resources when the production of resources is relatively decoupled from labour, which in some regards it already is.

Incidentally, if you find subcultures that place a high degree of value on the horse interesting, you might like this:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/dublins-teenage-horse-thugs