if humans don’t have to compete with automated actors for things that humans can’t produce (e.g., land or energy), humans could always just leave the automated society and build a 2025-like economy somewhere else
That only holds true if there exists such a “somewhere else”, and already on Earth as is, there just isn’t. Any innovation will quickly spread to every economy that has the capacity to accept it, and every square inch of the planet is either uninhabitable or monopolized by a state. This is in fact something that gets often highlighted in science fiction involving interplanetary colonization—one of the first things we (rightfully) imagine people doing is “fucking off to some distant planet to build the society they would like for themselves”. We know something like that happened with Europeans leaving for the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it would likely happen again if there was room to allow it.
This is a consequence of decreasing returns to scale! Without decreasing returns to scale, humans could buy some small territory before their labor is obsolete, and they could run a non-automated economy just on that small territory, and the fact that the territory is small would be no problem, since there are no decreasing returns to scale.
Well, that hits a limit no matter what. We have a physical scale set by the size of our own bodies. Also, I don’t believe there exists a single m2 of land on Earth where it would be legal to just go make your own country. People have tried with oceanic platforms, to mixed results.
That only holds true if there exists such a “somewhere else”, and already on Earth as is, there just isn’t. Any innovation will quickly spread to every economy that has the capacity to accept it, and every square inch of the planet is either uninhabitable or monopolized by a state. This is in fact something that gets often highlighted in science fiction involving interplanetary colonization—one of the first things we (rightfully) imagine people doing is “fucking off to some distant planet to build the society they would like for themselves”. We know something like that happened with Europeans leaving for the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it would likely happen again if there was room to allow it.
This is a consequence of decreasing returns to scale! Without decreasing returns to scale, humans could buy some small territory before their labor is obsolete, and they could run a non-automated economy just on that small territory, and the fact that the territory is small would be no problem, since there are no decreasing returns to scale.
Well, that hits a limit no matter what. We have a physical scale set by the size of our own bodies. Also, I don’t believe there exists a single m2 of land on Earth where it would be legal to just go make your own country. People have tried with oceanic platforms, to mixed results.