>1,2,3 Yup, except why do the developers not get the income? Presumably they are selling the machines? >4 Yes. The key with this kind of logic is to relate i

>1,2,3 Yup, except why do the developers not get the income? Presumably they are selling the machines? >4 Yes. The key with this kind of logic is to relate it to the current situation, though; people with more workers can afford even more workers. Why doesn't it all blow up now? There is more to success than simply scale of manufacturing capability; firms need to keep ahead of competitors, keep up with technology, manage the whole stack, etc, and then they can end up controlling the whole market (at the thing they do) and having nowhere else to go because the firms in other fields have an advantage that takes something special to beat. Also, the neat thing about capitalism is that money to buy more work is rarely the bottleneck, because you can get a capitalist to invest in your scheme (if it looks any good). >5 The second thing (poor get poorer) does not necessarily follow. Only the people who can't do anything that machines can't do better get poor. The working poor have more buying power because the machines create more wealth for less money. In practice, despite a lot of automation, we don't have many people unable to do anything productive; people are very much more versatile than machines (for now). More on that: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a... >In the future (my crazy thoughts): Yes, eventually the set of people who cannot do something that machines can't do better includes everyone, and everyone becomes unemployed. (Which looks pretty good, IMO; who likes working?). There are more serious problems than unemployment at this point, though. At this point, why do you expect the machines to still be under the control of the capitalists? If the machines can do capitalism, etc better than capitalists, any wealth that ends up in the hands of an autonomous machine will eventually increase to eclipse the human capitalists as well. (And of course, meanwhile the machines are increasing in effectiveness because they are better at machine design as well). This is called the "intelligence explosion" or "technological singularity" scenario, depending who you ask, and looks like bad news, unless we do some serious stuff to make sure the machines work to specifically benefit humanity instead of just continuing to find better and better ways to do whatever other task they were doing. (Better ways that eventually include overpowering humans militarily and melting us down for raw material). If you want more info: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ http://intelligenceexplosion.com/