alt Hacker NewsThe idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.
The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.
This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.
But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.
This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.
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Physics, or ... capital.
Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.
Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.
The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.
There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions