AI, automation, and inequality — how do we reach utopia?
Ok, not utopia per se but a post-scarcity-ish economy where people have their basic needs—food, shelter, healthcare—met virtually automatically. A world where, sure, maybe you have to earn money for certain very scarce luxuries like a tropical island trip, jewelry, nightly wagyu steak dinners, or a penthouse overlooking Central Park, but you get enough basic income to eat healthily and decently every day, have a modest but comfortable home, and not stress out about going to the hospital — and then you can choose if you want to work to earn money to buy additional luxuries or just spend your time to do sports, make art or music, pursue an academic interest, counsel or mentor others in your community, or devote yourself to nature conservation.
I want to get this conversation rolling regularly because it's evident that we're on a cusp of a new economic era — one where AI and automation could free us from a lot of menial physical and intellectual labor and the pretense that everyone has to work to earn their continued existence. It's evident that not everyone has to work. If anything, our economy could be more efficient if incompetent or unmotivated folks just stayed at home and got out of other people's way. I think we all know someone who stays in a job because they need it but are actually a net negative on the organization.
It's an open-ended topic, and there's a lot to talk about in this series—like, how would we distribute the fruits of automation? How would we politically achieve those mechanisms of distribution? What does partially automated healthcare look like?—but I think it'd be good to first talk about current economic inefficiencies that should and could be automated away.
I have trouble taking the question seriously because costs are only going down in certain areas. Electronics and computing, obviously. On the other hand, food, energy, housing, education, and healthcare continue to increase.
Why is this? Maybe in part due to Amdahl's law. For example, AI probably will automate some tasks in medicine, but better note-taking isn't likely to change overall trends towards expensive, advanced healthcare and higher labor costs. Solar power really is becoming much cheaper, and yet electricity rates aren't going down, because it turns out that there's more to reliably delivering electricity than generating it.
Efficient industries can pay workers more, increasing wages even in other sectors that didn't see any productivity improvement. These less-efficient industries soon become big costs and big employers. (For example, education and healthcare.)
Sometimes costs don't go down because quality improves instead. iPhones keep getting better, but not cheaper. People buy fancier and more expensive food, eating out and having more food delivered. How many workers bring a box lunch from home? It used to be common. College has gotten fancier. Students used to live in crowded dorms and eat bad food.
I also suspect that people have gotten out of the habit of living frugality. Why bother when so many of your costs seem to be out of your control?
Other examples:
Electric cars are a big advance, but cars don't get cheaper.
Driverless cars might yet happen, and that could be a big change. And yet, would they actually make taxi service cheaper? The car, the system that maintains the car, and energy are still big expenses.
There's no sign of big infrastructure projects getting any cheaper or more efficient.
Predicting the future is always difficult, but my guess is that there will be certain things that are dramatically less expensive, close to free, and yet people will take them for granted and continue to complain about the cost of living increasing, because overall, they didn't see any decrease in expenses.
Very interesting point. I grew up pretty poor, and when I graduated college and started my first tech job, it took me at least a year to adjust to this. I moved to NYC and rent was easily 90% of my costs because I ate free food from work whenever possible, never went out, limited myself to free activities on weekends like exploring the city on foot, and batch cooked cheap rice and beans for meals. I had months where I spent less than $100, yet my rent was almost $2000 (admittedly, I could have had more roommates or lived further out of the city and cut this in half, but then I couldn't have walked to work). I slowly gave up on trying to save because it was very socially limiting but only saved me a fraction of rent costs.
Flash forward a few years, and I moved in with a girlfriend. Suddenly rent costs were less than $1000/mo. So I could go out for lunch and dinner and drinks multiple times a week and still live cheaper than when I paid for my own bedroom.
I think this experience has really shaped my worldview and informed my belief that housing and transportation costs have ballooned wildly out of control in the USA (and the UK -- my experience elsewhere is limited). The homelessness crisis has only reinforced this belief. If we can reduce those costs for most people (which shouldn't be that hard, since housing and transportation are wildly inefficient), we could uplift a huge number of people from poverty into the middle class.
Great comment!
I'd also add that as technology advances, demands for increase in standard of living weigh heavily.
The overuse of the Earth's resources won't stop unless that mindset collectively changes.
That'd take a lot, considering it isn't happening at scale despite the climate crisis and the nature crisis the UN has described in frank and dire terms.
Your reply makes the idea seem impossible, but I wonder if automation and other efforts could curb skyrocketing costs as a whole. Like you mentioned some things might be dirt cheap and others more expensive, I wonder if the net family budget will resist inflation for the majority of the world with these new tools in place.
I wouldn't say it's impossible, just that we aren't seeing signs of broad, society-wide success at automation yet. I reacting to this:
I don't think it's evident at all. There are a lot of efforts at automation that fail, or that are apparently a long slog that most companies don't have the patience or deep pockets for (driverless cars).
But it's all based on looking backwards at recent history. It's very difficult to predict what new algorithms researchers might come up with or their impact. It wouldn't be hard to spin a scenario about major changes in ten years.
Understood thanks! I believe we all want very similar things, security in life, to be comfortable, and to be happy with the things we get to do each day. Maybe we will step a little closer to that with small advancements in tech.
I'm very pessimistic about this outcome, and frankly I think people who think this is even very likely, much less inevitable, have ideological blinders on.
Technological "progress" is not always an absolute good. The fact that we have imagined post-scarcity futures has no bearing on whether such a thing is likely, or even possible. There's no reason to think that efficiency gains from technological progress will ever be distributed in a way that makes work unnecessary for the vast majority of people. Rather than not having to work, it is more likely that people will be unable to work, and will be left to fend for themselves as best they can. Unless a significant portion of the world develops a class consciousness and becomes willing to fight, there is simply no reason for those with control over technological resources to share the gains.
So I guess that's my answer: a large portion of the world has to develop class consciousness and a willingness to fight.
The other problem, in my mind, is that, if ecological degradation continues at the current pace, any kind of utopia will be completely precluded, probably for the entire remainder of human existence. And, of course, there's the seemingly-intractable problem that nuclear weapons exist, and the likelihood that we will destroy ourselves with nukes approaches 1 as time goes to infinity.
I think this will eventually happen, it will just take things getting really really really bad first. I mean, don't forget, even in Star Trek their post-scarcity society was only achieved after a lot of unrest and war. The Bell riots happened in 2024 in-universe.
And not just war IIRC, nuclear WWIII where the vast majority of the population was wiped out.
It wouldn't shock me if it took that level of collective trauma in a hostile environment for the few remaining millions of people to choose to abandon war and unify.
Perhaps. I'm afraid that the current strongman/authoritarian/populist surge may be the "bad timeline" alternative, which might prevent a proper class consciousness from ever developing.
These elites are extremely stupid. If they gave a shit about consolidating their power long term they would have done a better job about sustainable growth back in the 1970s and 80s when they first started realizing the inherent problems with building a society on petrochemicals. Don't underestimate them sure, but don't overestimate them either. The wrong man in the right place can make all the difference, and thankfully there are a lot of idiots in a lot of the right places.
Besides, they're fighting an inevitability. You can't fight the future, and deindustrialization isn't optional. It'll just be a matter of how much pain we accept in the meantime
The issue here is that that's never really happened anywhere, except for in small, tiny pockets of like minded ideologues. There's a strong propensity within human nature for greed. That doesn't mean that everyone is greedy, but overall, there's a tendency for human beings to innately look out almost entirely for themselves, their families, maybe their close neighbors, and in rare cases their country. All of those things are relative also, there doesn't seem to be a natural point where most people think "welp, I have what I need, and my family has what we need, so next step is making sure my community has what they need."
The tendency is instead to try to continually improve what you and your closest social unit have, and the amount you care about people further away from you decreases exponentially with their social distance.
At no point has that tendency ever been demonstrated to be eliminated or even reduced. There have been efforts in communist country to quash that tendency with education (forced, often times), but large scale, centrally planned governments have always been rife with corruption.
The only thing revolutions have managed to accomplish is replacing one group of elites with another, whether based on national identity, ideology, race, popularity. I think that at least the way things currently are, at least in wealthy Western nations, is one of the most prosperous, equitable times in human history, besides brief abberations resulting from extraordinary circumstances, like post WW2 United States.
I think rolling the dice after any revolution is far, far more likely to mean a decrease in equitability, an increase in totalitarianism, and an overall lowering in quality of life for most people, rather than the inverse.
I can't help but think that people who advocate for sweeping revolutions either haven't studied much history, or have only studied very revisionist, biased versions of it.
More incremental, realistic changes to push the needle closer to a more fair and higher quality society is a way more prudent goal in my opinion.
I've had this argument many times over the course of my life and I don't really disagree with the rest of your post (I think that societal change happens slowly, I just think that civil unrest and rioting is a useful tool in that process) but this specific part is just wrong. "Greed is inherent human nature" is The Big Lie of capitalism. It's simply not true and never was. We have so many examples of how selfishness doesn't work and is actively bad for everyone, even individuals in the long run, but still this myth persists because of societal brainwashing. There are tons of examples of humans doing things at odds with our instincts, so even if greed is a base human instinct that's no justification. We don't consider it acceptable for someone that isn't a child to soil themselves in public, yet somehow scamming people is just something we need to encourage to live in a society? I don't buy it. Greed, like racism, is learned.
I don't expect to change the world in a day. I simply plan to live my life less selfishly and find others that do and show everyone that it doesn't have to be this way. And I think that's a much kinder and effective form of reeducation than the gulags ever were.
You're right, or at least that seems like the most likely outcome as things stand now.
Things like AI and automation making better standards of living possible for the masses isn't on the horizon, it's already in progress, automation has been creating (relative) surplus for a very long time.
Every major technological advance from farming and the wheel to the industrial revolution has increased the baseline standard of living. And in every case the majority of the surplus went to the top. The same has been true so far of the digital revolution.
The biggest difference now is that the big players in the economy have gotten better at capturing the surplus created by advances before it can benefit the majority of the population.
The answer, though, isn't to give in to the seemingly inevitable dytopia this implies. Some western countries have succeeded, through government, in carving out a larger part of pie for the general population (single payer, education, childcare, etc..). It's not on the level of UBI but it's evidence that it's possible in the modern world.
I dont think efficiencies is what's stopping people from being able to have the necessities met, and that's why I think tech improvements in efficiencies will never get us there.
The economic engine is a meat grinding machine that takes inputs of small critters and grinding them into meat. Let's imagine some of the critters don't want to be ground down and have been working hard to come up with ways to make the machine better, more efficient, more autonomous, more interactive and predictive and blah blah blah. We'll have a faster churn of little critter slurry.
We can make sure there is better distribution of currently already existing gains and resources by voting for politicians who talk about "radical" and aggressively caring for the last, the lost and the least among us as their main platform. Remember, if their platform focus on advancements and wealth instead of the poor, they're talking about how to shove you faster into the meat grinder queue.
Agreed, I think progress in social organization is more important than technological progress in this moment.
But I think there is strong feedback between the two. Technological progress is hampered by our superstitious reverence of the free market. Job creation is seen as a good thing. So there is natural pressure against increasing efficiency. Greed will drive companies to lay off employees whenever it's beneficial, but the short term profitability of paying humans as little as possible to do tasks that could be done more efficiently and safely by automated process is the norm in the manufacturing industry.
We have the tech now to automate away millions of jobs and provide much more wealth for humans. But it requires a huge upfront expense to develop those automation techniques and workout all the bugs. Our current economy very rarely allows companies to have that kind of long term planning. Instead it's just a matter of doing everything as cheaply as possible to stay competitive day to day.
If we took care of people regardless of their employment status, and incentivesed long term strategies like automation, those strategies would become cheaper very quickly as we developed economies of scale and established a knowledge base and standardized tools for setting them up.
So there is room and, I think, merit in politicians discussing advancements in technology and increased wealth for all as a result of eliminating poverty by mindfully and deliberately distributing resources more equally.
I want to talk about social and political organization in a future thread, because this topic is so big and encompasses everything about what it means to have a place in society.
Ideally, we should have a world where we celebrate job redundancy and the people made redundant can be secure in knowing that they can enjoy the fruits of automation — instead of our current world where those people are left scrambling for new work because they don't get to enjoy those fruits and their skills and labor left devalued.
Not long ago, I read that EVs are simpler than ICEVs (Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles) to manufacture. They have fewer moving parts; their production requires a lot less labor and therefore far fewer workers. Rationally, we should be happy that future cars take less labor to make! The United Autoworkers unions as well as incumbent automakers are important political constituents, and they pressured the Biden administration to softball the new ICEV emission limits in order to protect jobs and industry.
This is suboptimal for society. Personally, I favor cycling and public transit over driving; but if we are to have cars, then we should transition to EVs. But I think this example is one of many where industries and (less often) workers act in their rational self-interest to impede progress for society at large.
I also think about how tax prep software companies lobby against free filing. It wastes god knows how many hundreds of millions of hours (in the US) every year, just a handful of companies and several thousand workers can work. When I was in the Netherlands, doing my yearly taxes took maybe 5 minutes of logging onto the gov tax site, reviewing the numbers they had collected about me, and then accepting or correcting them.
I agree and this is where I want to aim the conversation series. We should aim to provide incentives, social safety nets and support structures, as well as knowledge infrastructure to accelerate automation in an equitable manner.
I've read this too (maybe on Tesla's blog in the early days), but I think this is one of those things that's true theoretically but hasn't turned out to be true in practice, or at least not yet. So far, hybrids seem to be cheaper and less expensive to repair than electric cars?
BYD seems to be able to make cheap electric cars in China, but so far not in other countries for some reason. Cheaper labor? Different regulatory requirements?
Understanding why complicated products cost what they do isn't easy. Competitors will take them apart to learn how they're made, but the deals with suppliers aren't known.
What needs to happen is that humanoid robots operate all or most of the supply chain that produces humanoid robots.
we're probably only a few years away from robots that can chain together and perform basic human tasks after receiving verbal instructions. Unloading a dishwasher and doing the dishes half as quickly as a human could, that sort of thing.
The logistical issues around making enough of those robots that they're cheap to buy, and having a crowded marketplace with lots of competition to drive prices down so that one company doesn't own the supply chain, is another problem.
Also, the graphics card market needs similar developments so that chatgpt-level llms can run on cheap local devices and not in the cloud
As the short story Manna reasonably laid out, I believe it’ll need more than just the possibility of utopia from a technical perspective, it’ll also have to “make sense” in an economic way. Things will (probably) not just start sprouting up for free left and right simply because it’s feasible that humans don’t have to be involved any longer (think layoffs as an example that’s a step or two lower on the tech ladder. After all, they could’ve just kept the employees on pay roll…).
I think it’ll need a group of several very, very dedicated individuals and/or companies actively working towards a “Project Utopia” in order for it to have even small aspirations at ever becoming reality for more than an elite few.
Even if we had universal maximum income where everyone could afford a McMansion and their own private archipelago, having a job and not having one would still be a social differentiator (the same way that having a university degree is still important to people in an age where anything can be learned from anywhere via the Internet).
So the big boss would still do the nepotism and you'd have his nephew as a coworker. The guy who you'll need to babysit and will be promoted before you but you'll still need to tactfully dismiss his dangerous ideas (economic and human life) even though he outranks you.
I think that technology for basic necessities has reached diminishing returns a long time ago, and we need to start with the broad strokes if we want to actually improve the economy. In fact, technology potentially makes things worse, because a smart-toaster has a shorter functional lifetime than a toaster that doesn't have wifi. We're creating entire new categories of failure-modes.
The two big expenses that "nobody talks about" are cars/transport costs, and homes/rent. They've been discussed at length in other topics (Build More Trains etc etc), so I won't repeat that here. But fundamentally, that's a political problem and technology won't help us (and anyone promising otherwise is worse-than-useless).
I think the next "innovation" might be heirloom tech; i.e. mid-range appliances etc that are built to last decades. This is a technical change in manufacturing, but the choice to make the change is ultimately an expression of values that is politically driven - the only way to sell "built to last" is to build a brand that markets reliability, and then make sure that brand is never cashed in for short-term profit. That last part is a problem, because MBAs see it as "extracting economic value" and "a very profitable strategy", not backstabbing customers.
There's also the overwork death-spiral: if people need e.g. a car to get to their job, and they get underpaid at the job which forces them to work overtime, then more people working overtime increases labor supply and thus reduces employee bargaining bargaining power and prevents them from demanding jobs be accessible without the car (WFH?) or from demanding more money so they can work less overtime. Or just the ability to decline overtime without being fired.
In fact, I think a big problem with 'overwork' is that society is built around 'full-time' work hours, so spending less often only lets you retire earlier, it doesn't let you actually reduce your work hours. Which incentivizes spending the excess money on time-saving things (cue mexican fishing joke).
I don't see housing as "just" a political problem, though it is that, too. Building new housing seems to be expensive no matter who does it. The Construction Physics blog has looked at this question from many angles. There are improvements to be made so that more housing actually gets built, but I'm pessimistic about anything, including political changes, making it cheaper to build.
It's a big subject, one with so many moving parts and social/economic/civilization concerns, with a variety of (good and bad) actors involved or injecting themselves into it, that it seems impossible. But any journey is accomplished by putting one foot in front of the other.
It's not impossible. Which isn't to say it won't be a journey, a tale that'll definitely make the history books and be taught in school to the amazement of the utopian children as those innocent kids boggle over how backwards and greedy the world before their time used to be.
Between here (capitalism teetering on the edge of dystopia) and there (a world where basic material needs such as food, housing, utilities, and medical care are readily available to everyone at no real cost) is the history part. And is the part people will tell you is impossible.
For example, capitalism is diametrically opposed to anything involving utopia. Any utopia technology is anti-capitalism, because capitalism only functions if you have scarcity and fearful masses. The fear has to revolve around not having enough, so prices get bid up and that fear can be used as a lever to convince the masses to accept what owners and the wealthy tell them. Which will be "do as we say, work here, take what we offer, and shut up the whole time."
So if you have what I'll be calling a "Bot" technology, the earliest stages will involve capitalistic concerns pulling strings and pushing buttons to delay or destroy it. They'll use governmental capture to inject obstacles and detours that add what'll probably be at least decades to the full natural adoption. All sorts of rationals will be trotted out, dressed up as safety or fairness concerns, and so on. Anything that allows Owners to keep control of what would be (in this example) a steadily decreasing cost of supply while they continue to charge and enjoy vast profits.
Because when the major actors in capitalism are megacorps, they have the resources to ensure they continue to rule. They invest in government, they invest in societal manipulation and control (look me in the eye with a straight face and say "professionals" don't know how to leverage today's social media to manipulate, manage, and control the masses), and they do all that so they remain in charge.
They do it to beat back upstart competitors. They do it to deny the basic rules of capitalism, which (in theory) describe how more efficient and agile and clever competitors will force prices to fall as supply rises (among other basic tenets that don't apply in the actual practice of capitalism as influenced by today's mega-entities). They do it to remain in charge.
For this purpose, a "Bot" technology is an increasingly automated technological solution to a production need. That need could be some form of manufacturing, of refining of some raw good, of production of some raw good. It's what would almost certainly be a growing collection of component technologies that increase the automation and reduce costs.
For example, if you plant a field by hand, weed and water and tend it by hand, then pick and deliver the food by hand, and finally process the food by hand prior to it finally arriving in some location (a store, a market stall, whatever) where a citizen will obtain it, take it home, and eat it ... that's expensive. Not simply in money; but in raw capital costs. Human capital like time and energy.
At every step, many humans were involved. Primitive farming techniques are immensely labor intensive, which is why a major source of technological advancement throughout human history has been looking for ways to get more food out of the same field with less human interaction.
Which has worked; what used to be an entire village spending a pretty sizable chunk of their collective time to ensure they have food for the year until the next major harvest season has steadily shrunk. Until today a vast farm capable of feeding hundreds for a year can be operated by a small handful of "farmers." Right now, they use a lot of machinery. Planting machinery, watering machinery, fertilizing and pest control machinery, harvest machinery, and of course transportation machinery that delivers the raw food to a processing facility (full of more machinery) which will clean, and often cut and sift and filter and cook and package the raw food into finished food.
The agricultural revolution freed vast segments of human population from needing to produce food, enabling other professions to be given human time to focus on. That's what the shift to BotTech will finish doing; completely free humans from needing to make all these necessary processes happen. From having to be involved step by step to ensure they take place.
It's not at all a stretch to imagine how technological progress continues to advance. Right now, farm machinery still has a human in the driver's seat. Many, possibly most, farm jobs in most foodstuffs involve sticking someone behind a steering wheel, perhaps a steering wheel next to some levers and buttons that Do Things, so that human triggers off or monitors the machinery doing the actual work. Actually shoving seed in the ground, or spraying water over the furrows, uncovering mature plants so they can be scooped up, and so on.
Automating today's semi-automated harvesters isn't a big leap of any kind. Especially not in a controlled environment like a farm field. Maybe a human might (drive, tow, or remote control) a machine to the corner of the field and push a go button, but even that will eventually fall before the advance of tech. So eventually you have the farm basically operating itself.
There's land, suitable for growing. Someone rolls up with machines and sets them up. There's a barn or whatever they park in when not in use. Then they drive out as needed, to clear and plow, plant, water, monitoring, all of it. Completely automatically, no human needed. When you can do that, just drop off machines, ensure the site is getting needed deliveries of seed and water and fertilizer and whatever else, and come back three or six months later to see the machines have trucks full of grain (or potatoes, strawberries, whatever) ready to be delivered ... that's BotTech.
If you have BotTech, you pretty much probably have (or will shortly on that technological advance timescale) BotTech that delivers it too. And also have BotTech that processes it. If the farm can plant, water, tend, harvest, and finally drop off truck after truck of potatoes at your factory, all without humans having to sit there and "work" to make it happen, there's likely no real reason your factory has to have humans "working" to have it process the potatoes.
Maybe it just washes and bags them before they get loaded into another truck that delivers them to the store. Maybe it cleans and cuts and fries them into chips before they're bagged and delivered to the store. Maybe they're dehydrated and boxed up for use as instant mash potatoes.
Whatever the actual product is, we're talking about raw foodstuffs showing up as a factory input. If the farm side is fully capable of full automation, the factory side probably is too. At that point, you have BotTech covering farm all the way to the store.
If you can get food to the store via BotTech, it's not much of a stretch to assume a little BotTech doesn't help at the store too. And if not immediately, during the first wave of those BotFarms feeding those BotFactories, probably quickly enough afterwards. If the farm can BotDrive potatoes to the BotFactory, and the BotFactory can prep and drive them to the store, then the store can probably have automated receiving that unloads them into the store's storage, and then probably even some form of a Bot that takes them as needed out into the store to wait on a shelf for a human to decide "ooh, I want to eat that".
Maybe you might have a human lift them out of the StoreBot to put on the shelf or whatever, but soon enough that'll go away too and it'll be completely fully automated from farm to consumer. Where, at no meaningful point during the process, was a human required to make it happen.
Sure humans are almost certainly monitoring, but as for having to actually work, not so much. Humans might approve decisions for where fields go, but that can be Bot since computers can take all the same information and run algorithms and analysis and all that to decide "no, this field sucks for wheat but would be okay for carrots" or whatever. Humans might check reports, "today Field 4C got water and there are no major pest problems; it's on track to yield a great load of carrots in another five weeks." But as for working, no at this point in the tech human work isn't needed like we know human work is needed today.
If you can do it with farm fields and food factories, you're probably already doing it with the rest of the supply and manufacturing sectors. As well as the transportation arena to deliver all those goods here and there. Again, we're talking about collections of tech, that build one atop the other. Combining to automate it all.
It doesn't have to be a Star Trek molecular assembly matrix like a replicator to be BotTech. After all, what would any of us care about the details? All we'd know is you send these (detailed list of probably six or eight) machines out to (farm site), make sure they have power and inputs (water, oil, seed, whatever), and come back at the end of the season to find potatoes are ready to go. Sure they didn't appear "magically", but they basically kind of did anyway, even though they did get planted and grew the way potatoes always grow once planted.
If everything's automated, it removes human labor as a major cost. Which is where part of the disruption will come from, because capitalism (giant agrocorps in food, but it'll be all corps in all major market sectors) will want to keep the gains for themselves. They'll want that humanless farm, that humanless food factory, and so on. Which doesn't work, because if society requires everyone to pay money to get (insert anything they need, survival or luxury or other) you can't fire the entire populace.
But that's a social concern, not a technological one. It'll take time, and require the people of the world to endure what I'd expect will be decades of needless upheaval, but eventually the truth of BotTech will win out.
Sure agricorps will be able to control FarmBots and FoodFactoryBots for a while. Sure they'll probably be able to pay or force government to insert roadblocks and laws and so on that keep "little people" from using the tech to tear away from the capitalism need to buy from corporate sources, but sooner or later the truth wins out.
What will the truth be? Again, we're postulating increasingly automated technology. Mining tech, tree harvesting tech, rubber harvesting tech. If you can automate factories, you can probably (and if not immediately, then at some point in almost all cases) figure out how to automate anything. Shove raw inputs in one side, and out the other comes whatever you wanted that factory to make. Bleach, rubber, computer chips, lawn ornaments, it wouldn't matter.
It's not "impossible", it's just an application of tech. You have technology that processes the thing, whatever it is. If there are steps, they figure out tech that does each step, and sometimes they'll figure out tech that can do multiple steps all in one machine, in one stop. Then you need other tech to move and hand off the whatever to the next step. Conveyor belts, robotic arms, self-drive carts, whatever; any tech that plugs into those gaps between the processing, so the flow can continue without a human having to "work" and fill that gap is what we're talking about.
After you have the tech, it'll start miniaturizing. It'll become more efficient, require less energy. Become faster, become less wasteful. What's a huge factory spanning block after block in size initially becomes, at some point, a collection of machines that are a more manageable size. Sooner or later, tech marches on.
Most factory work for humans, especially in recent decades, has been gap plugging. The machines do most of the actual work, but humans are needed to use human manipulation (with human hands and human minds controlling those hands) to take the work item out of machine 24 and hand it into machine 25. Just with tech that automates that "handing off" step humans are needed for now, you're quite a ways towards full humanless automation.
Economically, prices would start dropping towards the cost of supplies. Raw materials, of any kind. Which would see their prices dropping as well; if you can set a MineBot loose on a mountain that has (insert whatever desired minerals) and just see mined minerals roll out ready for processing, and the processing will be done fully automated too, prices will drop.
Again, it might take time, as firms of the era fight to keep their place within the loop, and they'll almost certainly succeed in adding decades to the transition time. But eventually things get too cheap for anyone to be able to argue they're a necessary part of the step.
Take food again, but (again) this applies to any market, any product. When anyone can run publicly available analysis to find suitable land, show up with FarmBot tech, make some arrangments for inputs to be made available (more Bots of various kinds), and just get food at harvest ... that's what you call readily available.
When BotTech is new and shiny and costs tens of millions per "bot", it'll still be a corporate thing. And we'd still be in the midst of "if you don't hire anyone for a paycheck, none of them can afford to buy your foods, which is why you're angry about how store shelves are regularly stripped clean by hungry thieves". That's the upheaval transition period I keep referring to.
But what's new and expensive eventually becomes not so much. BotTech will feed on itself. As (whoever) develops Bot technologies, those techs begin to eliminate costs from the process. Supplies become more available, and easier to process. Think of what CNC machines being available at a "hobby" level are doing, for example. CNC used to be million dollar machines, but now most people (maybe they save for a few months, but my point stands) can afford to purchase and operate them. Sure it's not industrial scale, but it's affordable. And next year, next decade, (etc) it's even more affordable and more available.
So the BotTech will advance, and at some point becomes so cheap and so available that it becomes patently obvious to society as a whole that trying to pretend most of what society needs to function is scarce will stop being something society believes. That's about the point you'll see governments, for example, deciding to just deploy FarmBots to feed their citizens. They'll take food (probably a lot of basic necessities, but let's just discuss food) away from profit oriented concerns and simply make it available to citizens.
Right now, that's something impossible to consider. How expensive would it be for the United States Federal Government to assume all farming operations in the country? Probably way, way, way more than they could afford, even if they diverted all federal income to the need. Paying to plant and maintain and harvest and deliver all those fields?
But with BotTech, when it's automated, it's mostly a one-time cost to install the Bots. And at that point, they're also equally cheap to maintain, and likely the maintenance is largely automated too. After all, if you have BotFactories, there's no reason you can't have MaintenanceBots that fix stuff or haul it off to the FixFactory to be fixed. And the Maintenance sector has all the same cheap raw goods and BotFactories to product parts and so on that the rest of the market sectors have.
So at some point, large concerns (probably some form of government) begin taking over basic market sectors. Food just shows up at the local "store", but it might be more of a distribution center at that point. And with Bots, it's not like you're trudging in to collect your burlap sacks of potatoes and grain and so on. You'd be looking at shelves of stuff you look at now; boxes of instant mashed potatoes, bagged minute rice, packages of chicken breast, whatever.
Which, again, would start happening everywhere. If you can Bot a farm and a factory, you can probably (again, sooner or later) Bot construction. So the barn, the house, the office building, the whatever, is mostly built via automation. Eventually completely by automation. Raw materials flow into BotFactories, are loaded into BotTrucks, and delivered to BotConstruction site. Come back a few days or weeks (whatever) later, and that place you pointed to and said "make a house be here" now has a house here.
Everything starts to work like that. Especially when so much of the basic needs work like that. A world where you never ever have to fear an empty stomach because the store/center is always there and always has more than enough food for you, that's a world where people eventually stop thinking in terms of fear. In terms of being afraid of scarcity.
Clothes, household goods, same. Clothes are at the clothes store. Bleach and soap and whatever, closet racks, shelves, anything; these products just start showing up. Governments can just push buttons and say "okay, so we opened up two new housing sectors here and here, and anyone who wants to put in for a room (or a house, shed, shack, condo, whatever) just needs to let us know."
Everyone has shelter, is fed, has clothes and basic supplies, and when they're sick they get treated.
Because what does "labor" and what would remain of the "labor economy" look like in a post-scarcity economy like we're postulating?
This is where people will bring back their "impossible" notions and cling to them. Because, again, right now all the stuff you need for life is expensive, so it's tough to think of a world where all that expense has been eliminated. Food takes dozens and dozens of people to grow and process and deliver to you in the amount you need to survive over a year, so "free food" seems impossible. But when it's very possible, where does that leave the market?
Luxury and innovation. Creativity. Sure anyone can get a bag of potato chips, even a bag of hot pepper cheese coated potato chips even. But some foodie oriented person who wants to play with settings and figure out new inputs? Who wants to come up with new flavor combinations, new preparations, and so on? That person, all those persons, can and will be doing that. Again, if not immediately during the early waves, eventually they will. Sooner or later. The tech keeps becoming cheaper and more available, and after it's out from under corporate and wealthy control, the advancement of Bots will keep happening.
And again, not just food; any market. Someone wants a new smartphone form factor, a new shape for it perhaps, they'll pretty much be able to make that happen. And if they like it, someone else might. Or might after they see it. Life begins to become incredibly trendy in an agile manner unheard of today. Right now, you talk about the "season's fashion" or "the latest model of (insert gizmo here)." And "latest" is measured in terms of annual or even multiple years.
When "latest" is "from this morning", trendy is definitely something I can see large segments of society latching on to. Something they'll seize upon to fill their time and amuse themselves with. Some people will be changing out their clothes, their "cars", their phones, their desks, maybe even their interior decorations, as often as it occurs to them to do so.
Right now that seems not just impossible, but insane. You read about billionaires who say stuff like "I never wear the same socks twice" and you think that's incredibly wasteful. But when socks cost literally nothing, and the "used" socks can be automatically cleaned and/or recycled to be repurposed without cost, that kind of decision becomes society wide. Right now, one rich guy can indulge himself, wallow in the amusement of knowing the socks he puts on are his and his alone. But eventually everyone's socks are one-time use.
Capitalism preaches that post-scarcity is impossible. Worse, insane. Capitalism doesn't exist in a society that has access to all its necessities basically for free. Capitalism will fight to hold that turnover off, fight to delay and prevent it, but sooner or later (knowing humans as I do, probably much more later than sooner), the availableness of BotTech will win over.
At that point, humanity will have begun to reorganize itself. People will devote themselves to the "fun" stuff, and I don't mean recreation. There'll be a lot of actual fun, actual recreation, but most people will probably be "indulging" themselves in creation. Innovation. Thought. Some people will actually create in the way we think of that word now, as in artistic creation.
But some will have the time to think. Every great thing you and I love came about because some human thought it up. And probably multiple humans got involved to continue the thought, innovating and developing and processing the thought until it became a reality, then a developed reality, and finally a piece of our reality we never think of because it's so ordinary and common and accepted.
Used to be, night was scary. Everything gets dark when the sun isn't there. Someone harnessed fire, and then candles and lamps came along. Someone else eventually figured out light without fire, and we had light bulbs and spotlights and so on. These days we have LED lights that are insanely energy efficient without sacrificing brightness.
There's a reason most serious science fiction thinkers eventually conclude a post-scarcity society sees a dramatic acceleration of human advancement. Because if you sit down and think it through, there's no real reason that a human society that doesn't spend the bulk of its waking hours struggling to survive (working to afford rent and food and so on) wouldn't find itself awash with ideas. Some of those ideas will be good ones, and when implementing them wouldn't be a random "win the lottery" kind of quest, a lot of the good ideas will take hold.
New technologies, new processing methods, new whatever. Sooner or later basic physics starts to fall. What happens when it's not a handful of "lucky" and "dedicated" physics professors scattered around the world who are paid to sit and consider physics. What happens when it's a lot of people, all of whom have time on their hands, who find physics amusing and enjoy its problems and issues. How much advancement happens when you have millions upon millions of people considering something like "physics."
Sure people will be considering better light bulbs and better water slides too, but some will be working on base techs. Like physics and physics manipulating techs. Engines are a physics manipulation tech; you take a mechanical linkage and drive it via explosions supplied by gas. Then we invented magnetic control techs and came up with electrical engines; just supply power and they spin.
At some point, someone figures out how to harness technology that can manipulate things on a molecular level. Why? Because that's what humans do, when they have time and aren't prevented from doing so; they think about things. Someone will be thinking about how to use fields and energy waves and whatever else to do what they want. And that person will eventually (either directly, or down the chain from someone else who finally puts it all together) come up with something like a replicator.
And at that point, you are living in Star Trek. With a magic machine that creates basically anything you want, so long as you hook it up to power and a soup bowl of raw materials.
Replicators are probably centuries away, maybe even millennia. But BotTech, we basically have most of what we need for BotTech now. Little pieces here and there might need a bit of work, and someone has to put it all together. But the only real reason we don't have FarmBot now is economics and "it's impossible" thinking.
Sooner or later, the involved tech pieces continue to advance, and someone will decide to start putting them together. Then there will be fighting and resistance and corruption, but the tech will keep advancing. Becoming cheaper, more available, less onerous to obtain and maintain.
Sooner or later the turning point happens, and BotTech takes over society. And we begin to enter post-scarcity.
A journey happens when you keep putting one foot after the next. How long you walk is up to you, but if you keep walking, you get somewhere. Sooner or later.
I think if any such utopia will come about it will be paralell to the mainstream of society for a while.
I think there is something wrong with the strategy of building up a grassroots movement to take over the federal government and enact that kind of change from a top down level, and it will never fully pan out.
Instead advances in AI and automation will build up to the point where small independent communities will be able to live mostly "off grid" while still being embedded in the larger nation level society to fulfill backup needs when your local production fails or is insufficient.
So itd be like a community level thing where youd have something akin to a neighborhood greenhouse and community center where you have access to stuff like 3d printers and automatic hydroponic crops to harvest food from. This might also include something like a microgrid hub for your whole neighborhood to share energy. But outside of your community thered still be the same system we currently have so you could always work a job and use the money to buy stuff from stores.
At first Id expect these types of communities to need a lot of upfront work and investment to set up, so it will maybe be limited to people who are willing to develop the right skillset to use those automation tools by hacking things together. Youll probably need to spend your own money buying your own stuff and it will probably be specialty commercial equipment that will be expensive until enough scale grows to where the price comes down.
These factors will dissuade people from trying this out for themselves, which is why I think it will be a niche thing at first. Similar to the homesteading movement, but I think the concept will work better when oriented toward small communities with certain shared resources rather than single family self sufficiency. The former is really not much of a departure from current apartment complexes. And I would expect there will be a large number of corporate versions of this who will do exactly that, create apartments with self sufficiency amenities as a selling point.
Eventually once the price point comes down to a level that encourages mass adoption, pretty much everwhere will be within range of some sort of self sufficiency ammenities. Possibly they would even be in overlapping territories of different groups offering access to their resources. So at this point you have your pick of where to get what you need, and the controller of each one would be able to impose their own conditions of how to get access.
All of this will be constrained by material and energy limitations. Hopefully we could collectively decide on a few core materials we can use to make the bulk of things a person would want and chose them to be easily reused or recycled materials. But I think we would need some kind of big advance in energy for this to become accessible to everyone.
Marx, Engels and Lenin already answered that.
Personalised, private AI assistants will be one advancement I'm looking forward to.
Apple's Siri is like the v0.1 of that. It does all on device and "learns" that you go to this place at this time usually and when you go in your car it offers to navigate there for example.
This but to a Nth degree. I could tell it (or it could learn) the things I'm interested in and it would scour the internet for related content and provide it to me on appropriate times.
"I see you're doomscrolling Twitter/X/Mastodon/TikTok again, did you know that there's a new video by TechnologyConnections out, would you rather watch that?"
"J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has a recipe that matches what you have in your fridge currently, would you want me to summarise the instructions from the video?"
Stuff like that isn't impossible, it's perfectly doable today - but a bit too resource intensive for mass adoption. And way too many people want to sell that to you as a service, while using your personal data. I don't want some startup bros seeing my personal AI notifying me of a new ... erotic video by my favourite performer for example =)
There are only two directions for mankind when AI begins to take over labor, from the most skilled to the least skilled: renaissance or revolution. Choose wisely.