ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
So....
I mean, "yes" but also... the economics will decouple from reality. Google just announced yesterday (or maybe Friday, don't remember) their tooling to allow bots to access money. You'll have bots buying and selling virtual assets first, then bots buying and selling physical assets, and the hamster wheel will keep spinning. There'll be robots hiring people to do stuff the robots can't do, etc. In the short run I expect inflation to continue, in the long run I expect a massive deflationary pressure on most "stuff" that people can buy because to paraphrase what you say, "who is going to be able to afford [literally anything]?" In the short run, continued inflation, but beyond some crazy inflection point I expect competition and political instability to undercut the whole thing. But the robots themselves will prop up the economy. It'll be jarring, because you'll see massive reductions in well being for people you personally know, but the S&P500 will never be higher. We're kind of already there where the material conditions of the average person don't match the value of the market in any meaningful way.
After a certain point, that will become untenable and politicos will start pandering to the increasingly dispossessed masses and to hold on to power (and avoid a Nepal situation) they'll cut us "unwashed masses" in. Also, competition to sell to increasingly poorer people will drive some deflation at this point? I don't know - I'm not an economist and my crystal ball is broken. End stage though? I suspect the hamster wheel will continue automatically but most of the humans will have fallen off of it. But, "yeah" there is not a point to any of this. It's all made up. Money isn't real. And basically we're all playing this crazy game where we try to optimize and gamble correctly so we can stop working eventually when we could be working to intentionally try to automate and remove all drudgery and terribleness from our working lives and stop working now. The game has been broken for a long time.
I mean, there will always be stuff to do, but if we could get rid of some of the boring stuff that would be a nice start. It will likely be the end of the current economic paradigm though and a lot of people are not going to like that. It won't be some sharp Marxian transition - it'll be just like when democracy and the republic began to spread around the world (along with Capitalism) - there will be places where it's more or less prevalent until the "normal" way of things is some sort of post-scarcity UBI thing instead of "every man for himself." But all this is going to take time - probably a decade? And in the mean time I don't know about you but I have the strong urge to do better than simply avoid privation.
But yeah! Go spend time on your sailboat because that probably is the answer. That's literally my plan to all of this. Set things up the way I want them more or less now, then ride the wave into the future. If I'm not fed feet first into the paperclip machine, I'll be set even if the automation utopia never arises because I don't have any debt, I own my land, and barring massive increases in property taxes (mine are low), I'm pretty much able to sustain.
