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So elot often says that if there were a bunch of robots and you don't need human labor anymore than the term GDP in an economy sort of becomes irrelevant because typically an economy is based on labor traded for Capital but if you have all the labor you need basically for free or rather for the cost of the electricity and repairs then the whole foundation of trading labor for Capital is destroyed.

So assuming someone doesn't monopolize all the robots and everybody is left impoverished and while somebody has all the robots that's making everything for free at no cost to them and selling them to the impoverished people which has been the actual history of all industrial improvements in the United States let's just assuming that doesn't happen this time for some reason. Where does that leave us.

well let's start with every home has say two robots that can do all the labor required in the home. It can clean it can cook and it can build stuff for you. It can build whatever you need to buy so you don't need to buy it anymore because your robot can go build it for you. So what does that really mean well your cost then are electricity and the materials the raw materials needed for your robot to use to build what you want. Maybe some metal maybe some wood maybe plastic and 3D machines I don't know but let's just play that game for a minute.

So what does that do to your behavior and everything if your robot can go in your backyard and assemble pieces of raw material and build you a car or a motorcycle or a washing machine or whatever device you happen to want for that moment.? Well then you don't need to go to Target or a hardware store or an appliance store to get those things cuz your robot can build it for you.

But let's take it further? if your robot can build it for you and it doesn't take you any hard-earned money to go buy it and your robot has enough electricity let's say you just have enough solar panels to constantly run your robot at full speed all the time then that means your robot can disassemble the thing it just built for you yesterday and can build you whatever you win have you as your whim today. So what that means is the economy would move to a situation where people don't have products that last they have products that can be easily disassembled and reassembled into other things.

Today your robot build you a washing machine tomorrow it takes it apart and it builds you a lawn mower which it then pushes so you don't have to push the


But now let's think about it further how many of the devices that you currently would go and buy would you actually need if you have a robot. For example would you really need a lawn mower or is it more likely the robot would build itself a cutting arm and it would walk around with this cutting arm on one of its ankles and it would mow it it would mow your lawn as a lawn mower rather than needing a lawn mower. and the same robot would have a twisty thing and stick its hand in the sink with a twisty thing and dump your clothes in the sink with some soap and it would become your washing machine so you wouldn't need a washing machine in fact would you really need a car or a motorcycle because why wouldn't the robot be able to attach a couple of Wheels to its legs and carry you around and it's arms with a special seat like some kind of weird balancing wheel device like that funny thing that used to be around all the time instead of you ever having a motorcycle or a car?

So the point is not only would the division and the trade between labor and capital be dissolved but actually many many things that you might even want and crave would be completely replaced by the robot itself. The robot wouldn't simply take a human's place to operate the current machines. The robot would actually replace the current machines and would do the things itself in a different way like cutting the lawn with an ankle razor blade that spun around on its ankle as it walked.

now this is of course sort of the Nirvana of science fiction which makes the huge mistake of presuming that suddenly monopolist no longer want to control all technology and make free operation of that technology illegal but suddenly all the people like Bill Gates and other assholes in the world no longer exist and everybody just wants everybody else to have everything for free and so everybody ends up having their robots for whatever the true cost of the robot is. Now that's unlikely and it's never been true in our history and it's unlikely that human motivations to monopolize and become the top dog even when they don't even need to be the top dog anymore because you can have everything you want for free well then it doesn't change the fact that they're still going to be people out there who want to monopolize the technology and be the top dog just because they want to and they're sociopaths.

The farthest extreme of robotics is the materializer on Star trek. When you can go to the machine and have it create whatever you want out of pure atomic structure as the one episode where they reanimated the rich guy from the 19th century said you don't really need money anymore when you can go and have the machine materialize whatever you might need so therefore people do other things.


Anyway I've just been thinking about this for a while and I just realized most people are thinking about robots as human replacements but what robots really will be is not only human replacements but they will be appliance replacements and many other things. They won't take the place of the human to do the things they will actually replace the way humans do things.