Comment by K0balt

I really wish that logic held.

Automation doesn’t need customers.

Automation just needs more automation, and access to energy and natural resources, both of which don’t require money if you have enough automation.

Ultimately, Money is only used to pay wages, nothing else… so no wages to pay, no money required. In the post employment scenario, money is not needed by industry. You don’t pay the forest to cut the trees, you don’t pay the dirt to mine the iron, and you don’t pay the sun to grow the crops.

Capital doesn’t need to produce goods for customers. It just needs coercive power to gain and maintain access to resources and energy. You know what gives you that power? An army of 20 million self manufacturering robots.

It’s the grey-goo scenario, only with a few humans nominally involved, and on a macroscopic scale instead of nanotechnology.

Humans are the main impediment to unchecked capital growth. Soon, that impediment could be largely removed. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

With automation, there is no need for the rest of us to exist in order to support the capital class. Ai enabled robotics won’t just eliminate employment, it will make money (and increasingly, people) irrelevant to capitalism. The new capital is automation capability, and you only need energy and raw materials beyond that.

You don’t buy a yacht, you build a one-yacht factory and build it from raw materials. With a few million self manufacturing robots, you don’t need money to have enormous wealth and power.

When they want money, they will mine it. Gold, bitcoin, whatever doesn’t involve hiring people. The rest of us outside the gilded walls will be increasingly irrelevant scavenging over the scraps and trying to maintain some kind of agrarian society since manufacturing will be largely pointless.