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What matters is the total size of the market and the total size of the labor pool. If the Hyperclass have more wealth than all of humanity had prior, they don't
by alexbecker 10y ago
What matters is the total size of the market and the total size of the labor pool. If the Hyperclass have more wealth than all of humanity had prior, they don't need to sell to the masses to make money. If the labor pool is mostly machines they own, they don't need to pay the masses, or even a functioning market among the masses to enable it. In the degenerate case, where a single individual controls all wealth, if they have self-running machines that can do everything necessary to make more self-running machines, that individual can continue to get richer (in material goods; money makes no sense in this case).
- kodfodrasz 10y agoIn such case what stops the masses to create a parallel economy of their own?
- alexbecker 10y agoI imagine that would happen, but as soon as the size of their economy was large enough to attract the notice of the Hyperclass, or even just one member, it would be completely undercut by them. I don't know what an equilibrium state would look like.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoI beleive that technology would still drip, if not flow from the elite world to the outsiders, and eventually they yould maybe leave the planet, for example, and leave the elites in their world, something like in Asimov's tales where the solarians and auroreans lived comfortably with their robotic servants and autofactories happily ever after, until extinction.