I picked those two as an example because they put us in conflict. Only one of us can get what we want, the other has to go without. It's not like we can just

I picked those two as an example because they put us in conflict. Only one of us can get what we want, the other has to go without. It's not like we can just manufacture more earths so that there's now plenty to go around. That's the dynamic I'm after: cases where we can't satisfy the drive for more by making more. Instead of being cherry-picked scenarios, they'll be all that's left. Scarcity-based economics will have done its job. (I know that clean air and space exploration are not mutually exclusive, strictly speaking. There's probably a better example out there.) > Do you mean that weĺl just focus more on getting those resources I don't think we'll be focused on owning those resources. Breathable air isn't really something you can barter (unless you have it in a tank, I suppose), nor is space exploration. When the only problems left are the ones that put us in conflict in ways that cannot mediated by production, we'll be focused more on outcomes than ownership of resources. It's not that there won't be scarcity, it's just that scarcity will not be at the center of our economics anymore. I imagine we'll trade in abstractions that act as proofs of having contributed to widely desired outcomes. Perhaps I'll shop at stores that don't accept space-coin and you'll shop at stores that don't accept earth-coin or somesuch. Which sorts of coin people decide to accept will be a form a political speech. Participating in some organization's economy as a form of consent for its actions. I know I'm getting pretty far out there. My point is that since software is the the bottleneck for such a wide variety of economically impacting things, if we ever reach a state where all software problems are easy problems, we will then be in a vastly different world. Worrying about what we, the experienced software creators, will do for a job in that world is a little bit like worrying about what to wear to a close encounter with aliens. Let's just get there and wing it. We'll be no less prepared than anybody else. The alternative is to backpedal and refuse to automate ourselves out of a job, despite having shown no qualms about automating everyone else out of a job, but I think that completing the automate-everything task and forcing a new economics is the better move.