Land is scarce and cant be produced, so whoever already owns it will benefit after the change.
Capital can be produced, but what produces it? Labor. Even worse, capital depreciates over time so just owning some now doesn’t guarantee you an income in the post labor future.
In a fully automated world where human labor is truly of zero value it seems the main returns in the long run are to those who can gate keep valuable land, natural resources, and other fundamentally scarce assets.
Technically, what you've just described is Georgism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The real question is, in a truly post-labor future, how do workers have enough leverage to negotiate for any particular change in the economic system?
No, the land owners have bought and paid for every politician. Not gonna happen.
One of the many flaws of such immaginary worlds is thinking that people will be content to live in a system where they have no creative outlet left and nothing they do will have any ultimate meaning.
People in those conditions might burn down the system for the mere excitement of novelty. Even experimental rat utopias quickly degenerate.
If you’re thinking Scandinavian countries they are mixed economies. Most successful economies today are mixed economies.
Socialism is very well defined and it's made nebulous only to claim virtues it doesn't have.
Scandinavian countries aren't socialist. They themselves say they are not socialist and a simple google search for "are scandinavian countries socialist?" will show you that the consensus is that they are not.
On the sliding scale of welfare state socialism, Finland and Norway have the greatest degree of public investment. Angola would be on the other side of that spectrum, with almost no public services or redistributive programs offered.
I think what isn’t said here is that there was a lot of blood involved in getting weekends and 8 hour workdays. Labor strikes used to be violent, and social programs are pitchfork insurance for the global elite.
If the owners of capital control all means of production, all automated, they will control literal robot armies - we already see this developing with drones and the like.
It’s entirely possible that the global elite succeeds in fighting off the underclass and their reality looks a lot more like Elysium where the owners of capital do not have to worry about the angry masses reaching them.
The rest of the piece makes a lot more sense given the context that the author is temporarily divorced from the broader economy
No, that’s not how it worked.
Children were made to work in mines and factories to the point of exhaustion - so much so that, by adulthood, many were in poor health.
Prussia outlawed child labor and introduced public schools not because of Enlightenment ideas about human rights or education, but to train soldiers.
This idealization is not just a small historical omission; it’s the root cause of many core issues in the current education system. We take the current school system for granted - "either this or a lack of education" - but many features (e.g., teaching by age cohorts; the teacher as superior; everything organized in inflexible blocks of time; students expected to sit and stand on command, etc.) are not universal and are likely not optimal for growth. They were, however, very good for training infantry and factory workers - over 100 years ago.
Automation will collapse wages but raise living standards: As AI and robotics replace all labor, human wages will fall—but productivity and wealth will soar, leading to better health, abundance, and comfort.
Historical parallel—child labor’s decline: Just as industrial automation freed children from farm work and shifted society toward education, future automation will free adults from economic necessity, redefining “work.”
AI as the new labor force: Trillions of digital workers could multiply global GDP many times over, making each human comparably wealthy—like Qatari citizens supported by a huge migrant workforce.
Redistribution will likely spread prosperity: Past trends and political realities suggest wealth from full automation will be broadly, though unequally, shared through asset ownership and social programs.
Post-scarcity future: Humanity may enjoy radical technologies—mind uploading, fusion power, genome control, and disease reversal—ushering in an era of leisure, health, and creativity beyond today’s imagination.
From what money is that "ten-fold increase in revenue" coming from if no one is working? Is this a chicken/egg problem in the beginning in order to ramp this economy up? But even it it can get ramped up, the described scenario feels like a zero-sum game no? Like we're all just playing a continuous poker game with the same players and all the same money.
This is sell-side idealist thinking and blurred view of reality. We're not approaching it, we're not even seeing metrics to suggest that any sub-division of any business is making serious progress there at all.
Too many people are hyping something that will not happen in our lifetimes and we risk looking beyond the terrible state of large global economies, poor business practice and human exploitation on mass scales to a place we will never see. It's more fun to try and shape future possibilities for large profit that we'll probably never have to justify, than attempt to deal with current realities, and thus go against the grain of investment trends today, for an uncertain benefit.
I do not know whether the outcome will be good or not, but it's good to recognize that wealth can increase even in the face of widespread automation.
At which point, what will be the "moat" between the haves and have nots?
Ideally this sort of AI would completely flatten the inequality curve, because whatever edge you would have, the AI would equalize that for those at a disadvantage. Given that the AI is equally available for everyone.
This alone, brings me to believe that when we get there, there will be some built-in safety mechanism to preserve power for those that are powerful. Sorry if I'm being a bit too general with this discussion, but if we're going to face a scenario where AI becomes too powerful, obviously all humans will/should feel the effect.
I think that people will try yet fail to build perfect security mechanisms for controlling the spread of smart robots. If robots build robots, and smart robots are smart because of software, then trying to stop copies of smart robots is like trying to prevent copies of movies. Most people will come to have their material needs met by smart robots, and in the typical case this will be an improvement in quality of life for people on Earth.
Unfortunately, it also means that when people have deadly impulses disconnected from material deprivation, the power to kill will be greatly amplified. Tiny states and even sub-national groups could easily acquire nuclear weapons. The key technical insights are already published. It just takes engineering work and willingness to violate international norms to develop an arsenal. (International norms are not going to be enforceable by "soft" measures like sanctions if every nation can be simultaneously autarkic and prosperous, thanks to smart robots.)
WMD proliferation in turn may drive more comprehensive, paranoid global surveillance and an increasing number of preemptive attacks on facilities that could become weapons factories. Fear of military attack then drives more small states to actually seek a nuclear deterrent. An increased number of actors with nuclear weapons increases the chance that they will kill people on a large scale either deliberately or accidentally (like a "retaliatory" launch against a falsely detected incoming strike from another nation.)
One piece in the logic I don't get is this: why would (or should) the earnings done by those workers go into the pockets of humanity, who isn't doing the work, rather than into the pockets of the laborers, whether digital or not?
Isn’t the end goal of any successful state ultimately to hold and protect a monopoly on violence, which is more “efficient” and less violent to the participants?
I once worked with a founder whose side business was building and selling yachts. Why yachts? If you asked him, he'd say because yacht buyers are the ones who have money.