5 September 2024
The thing we describe as our “economy” is not a part of nature of physics which is outside of our control. While it is not easy, it can be altered by humanity to suit our needs. Or it can be eliminated altogether.
The first question to ask is: what is an economy? Basically it is a balance between production of goods and services vs consumption.
Imagine a society of one person, where that person must gather enough food and create shelter and clothing sufficient to meet the requirements of one person. Extrapolate that to a group of ten, where perhaps a couple gather the food for all ten, a couple build shelters, one skins animals, another makes clothing, etc. As long as the volume of production matches the consumption demands of the group, the economy is sound.
Where it goes out of balance is when the goods and services needed by the people exceed production. This can happen by various causes. It results in the scarce resources going into higher demand. (Without making this more complex by talking about money, just know that this is where inflation comes from.)
By increasing production so that it again balances with consumption, the stress on the economy is relieved, and people are better able to access the things they need and want.
Various events throughout history have caused a sudden shift toward a greater volume of productivity for society, giving people easier access to the products and services they need to survive. The advent of agriculture was one. Suddenly people did not have to spend so much time hunting and gathering, and they could dedicate more of their life to leisure, writing or advancing technology. This also caused people to develop their appetite for goods and services beyond just basic survival, since many more could now access items and services of leisure and lifestyle.
The Industrial Revolution, the assembly line, the advent of computers, all of these things had the same effect of making it possible for people to produce more per individual, tending to improve the balance of the economy.
Efforts that tend to unbalance the economy include people and groups who do not contribute; large scale waste (inefficient government spending); individuals amassing wealth and so on. These things can be effectively counterbalanced by simply producing more, but sometimes governments can be very wasteful.
Now consider this: A robot that can navigate the real world and do useful work can create products and services for society without increasing consumption demands. The robot does not need a salary or a house or clothes or a vacation. If you put robots to the tasks of mining resources and building and maintaining robots, you essentially make robots virtually costless.
Robots can then contribute value (goods and services) to society and improve the economy without limit. Like the science fiction story of sending a can of nanobots to a barren planet and then arriving a few millennia later to a fully terraformed planet replete with cities and infrastructure ready for human use, our humanoid robots could make more robots sufficient to satisfy all human requirements (needs and desires) for goods and services. Plus they could fix other problems we humans have caused like reforestation, cleaning excess CO2 from the atmosphere, unpolluting the oceans, recycling all our nasty landfills and moving all of our mining activities to asteroids.
These ideas are discussed in greater detail here.