Why would you pay robots? And there are no infrastructure costs because robots will build and maintain the infrastructure. Capital investment becomes useless - all goods are free, money has no value, so why would you want to make money?
It may be questionable if we ever reach full automation but in this hypothetical scenario money as we know it will be worthless.
Even with full automation, you still have the problem of coordinating the economy as a whole, in a way that can't be gamed or controlled by any one person.
And you'll need a way to rationally allocate resources that takes into account new innovation, when people disagree.
For both these reasons, you'll still want market pricing. Even if all basic consumer goods become non-scarce (and therefore free), there will always be some upper bound at which goods are still scarce.
Another way to say this is that prices will get very, very low, but not zero. If energy costs zero, then anyone who wants can launch a mission to Alpha Centauri. But if energy costs the average person $0.10/year, it's practically free, while still being rationally allocated among really big users.
There will always be things that are so ambitious they have a price. Star Trek's moneyless economy is fundamentally contradictory: in a truly scarcity-free world, anybody who wanted could own their own Enterprise-class starship.
(How does an unemployable human come up with even $0.10/year for their energy, etc? They, or their government, or a charity, just need to own a little bit of the robotic factories paying dividends.)
Of course you are correct. But you still pay the company that owns the robots. (Unless you're suggesting that there will be robots with no owner? I don't have to point out the problems with that, do I?)
The relevant question is, "what expenses does a company that runs a robotic factory have?"
This was Step 3 of my exercise. I offer it as a tool someone might use to answer their own questions.
Unless you're suggesting that there will be robots with no owner? I don't have to point out the problems with that, do I?
That's actually what I had in mind - we build some robots doing all the work, maintaining themselves and what not. They would happily continue building iPhones even after the last human died. And they are owned - if you want to call it that - communistically by all humans. From time to time everybody can vote if he prefers to have more iPhones or more Android phones, vanilla ice cream or strawberry to actually produce the desired goods and that's it.
You are hinting at some problems with that scenario but I am unable to see them - would you mind to elaborate on this?
> From time to time everybody can vote if he prefers to have more iPhones or more Android phones, vanilla ice cream or strawberry to actually produce the desired goods and that's it.
This is the crux of the problem: it's not just final consumer goods that need to be chosen, but every intermediate good up and down the value chain. And each of those choices is subject to differences of opinion, rapidly changing inputs, and shifting technologies.
And even at the consumer-goods level, the complexity of the voting would be astounding. It's not going to be a question of simple two-way elections -- you really need to measure a gigantic matrix of relative preferences for each person, and nobody has enough information about relative inputs costs to even accurately fill out their own matrix.
This is precisely why market pricing is so useful, and why it is unlikely to ever disappear entirely.
It may be questionable if we ever reach full automation but in this hypothetical scenario money as we know it will be worthless.