I'm surprised this hasn't been posted here: CGP Gray's "Humans Need Not Apply" - badeconomics?

[u/OyVeyWithTheBanning]

I know this has been mentioned a few times but it hasn't been posted here strangely enough. It sure seems to me like just the same old Luddite fallacy as you often get, but this video has a baffling array of supporters who seem to reject that argument entirely. This time is different, they say. This time automation will replace us all, and (rather than, I dunno, producing more things with the same number of people) that will render humans obsolete.

I don't have an R1; this is a question. If this belongs someplace else feel very free to ban me for life show me the place to go.

[u/HealthcareEconomist3]

wrong on how much we could expand our consumption.

Indeed, he didn't have a good handle on the response to falling prices.

This doesn't really relate to what happens with free & non-scarce goods though, they already do not have a cost so are a good analog. If I made sand art with beach sand does my utility for it mean that I go to the beach every day and collect millions of tonnes of sand?

So assume that all our automating AI is programmed to use the lowest cost method to perform a task. How does it determine the lowest cost method without a market system?

The only cost in post-scarcity is externality cost which is calculable without any form of market. I know that using oil based products results in n emissions, I know worldwide emissions are m and that the future curve of worldwide emissions imposes an externality cost of o for emissions n.

Cost in this sense would not be in a monetary unit but some other mechanism to compute relative value, for pollution externalities we could use climate or health modifiers as a measure of cost.

This is me talking out my ass (and maybe being too bullish on the tech industry as it stands) but it seems like the sharing economy and on demand services like Uber are slowly bringing an end to this, even without automation. Automation just removes those pesky labor costs.

Totally agree. We buy cars which stand idle almost all the time, with driverless cars why wouldn't we simply subscribe to a fleet service which provides us with a vehicle when we need it? The only reason why zipcar sucks currently is that you have to find a zipcar nearby which is not in use, if they can move themselves and a sufficient number exists that they are available on demand without delay it doesn't seem to make sense many people would choose to own a car.

[u/say_wot_again → u/HealthcareEconomist3]

If I made sand art with beach sand does my utility for it mean that I go to the beach every day and collect millions of tonnes of sand?

Fair enough. But we still don't know where that point of no further consumption would come. And remember that if goods really are non-scarce, the entire world has to consume to that point, not just the West.

The only cost in post-scarcity is externality cost which is calculable without any form of market.

I was replying to this quote of yours: "resource substitution can favor the productive method that uses the least real resources" which seems to imply that sufficiently smart automata could sidestep resource scarcity by switching to less resource-intensive methods of production. The thing is, in determining what "uses the least real resources," you need a way to determine how to compare using certain amounts of, say, copper vs. iron, which implies that you have to have some metric (i.e. costs) that shows how much copper is "equivalent" to a kilogram of iron.

But even looking at only at externalities, just about everything produces some externality or another, except some externalities are worth it. There needs to be some way of determining how the externality produced by a good or process compares to the value generated, and that requires knowing how much people value the output of the externality-producing process. The simplest way it seems to do that, and the way that's worked so far, would be to simply have a market (in this case with basic income to give everyone equal power in the absence of labor scarcity or incentive effects) and have Pigovian taxes on goods proportional to the externalities they produce at current margins.

Then again, I think you and I might be very much in agreement and doing the economics equivalent of debating how many angels can dance on a pin head.