I think there’s simply not a good reason to fully automate consumption. It’s one of those ideas that sounds intuitive in abstract, but in practice it means taking a step of automating away the very reason anything was being done at all, and historically when a part of the economy becomes completely self-serving like this, it collapses and we call it a bubble.
There is some open question about what happens if literally the entire economy becomes a bubble. Could it self sustain? Maybe yes, though I’m not sure how we get there without the incremental bubbles collapsing before they combine to form a single big bubble that encompasses all economic activity. If that happened, I’d consider this to be a paperclip maximizer scenario. If no, then I think we get an Autofac-like world.
I think there’s simply not a good reason to fully automate consumption. It’s one of those ideas that sounds intuitive in abstract, but in practice it means taking a step of automating away the very reason anything was being done at all, and historically when a part of the economy becomes completely self-serving like this, it collapses and we call it a bubble.
There is some open question about what happens if literally the entire economy becomes a bubble. Could it self sustain? Maybe yes, though I’m not sure how we get there without the incremental bubbles collapsing before they combine to form a single big bubble that encompasses all economic activity. If that happened, I’d consider this to be a paperclip maximizer scenario. If no, then I think we get an Autofac-like world.