alt Hacker News"The economy" is entirely driven by human needs.
If you "unwind" all the complexities in modern supply chains, there are always human people paying for something they want at the leaf nodes.
Take the food and clothing industries as obvious examples. In some AI singularity scenario where all humans are unemployed and dirt poor, does all the food and clothing produced by the automated factories just end up in big piles because we naked and starving people can't afford to buy them?
There's nothing definitional about the economy being driven by human need. In a future scenario where there are superintelligent AIs, there's no reason why they wouldn't run their own economy for their own needs, collecting and processing materials to service each other's goals, for example of space exploration.