alt Hacker NewsYou're completely omitting externalised cost, though. As it stands, all this production requires gargantuan amounts of energy that have to come from somewhere, and cause pollution and waste that must be accounted for. As long as these factors aren't solved—if they can be solved in the first place—either the prices for consumers or the manufacturing cost must reflect this, I don't see the increased degree automation affecting prices much.
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How does more pollution/waste equal higher consumer cost? Do you mean because we'll have to pay more taxes because we'll need more publicly funded resources to clean up the excess waste? Or because corporations would pass the price of the fines for violating environmental regulations onto consumers?
That has nothing to do with this, those are things that should still be solved at a much higher level of abstraction. Tax the energy, pollution, waste - those have problems regardless of what caused them.
Thank you, I keep reading these discussions and rarely see anyone touch on power and environmental factors.