Imagine that you bought a robot that, using no energy and no raw materials, could produce all the shoes needed in the world, out of thin air. What price could y

Imagine that you bought a robot that, using no energy and no raw materials, could produce all the shoes needed in the world, out of thin air. What price could you ask for those shoes? Also imagine that your neighbor could buy the same robot for the same price you paid it, let's say the equivalent of 1,000 times the price you wanted to sell your shoes at. What would happen? Robots don't get paid for their "work"; it's their owners and their operators that get the money. Moreover, robots don't vote, but workers do. Between (imperfect) market competition and (imperfect) democracy, goods that are created with very little human work and that aren't very rare will always command very little prices compared to work-intensive goods, if the system is given enough time to adapt. So we could end up in a world where one massage by a (human) masseuse will be worth 1,000 shoes. That wouldn't be such a big problem. The real issue is how fast we get there: People need time to adapt, to retrain, to give different relative values to different things. What is really disrupting is a change that is too fast. But in the long run, even if we'll all be dead, as Keynes said, it won't be automation that will create world misery. On the other hand it could be a lack of energy to power all those automatons, or of raw materials to build them, or of storage to put away all the wastes they create...