if we reach AGI, presumably the robots will be ordering hot oil foot soaking baths after a long day of rewriting linux from scratch and mining gold underwater and so forth.
Why would they need people who produce X but consume 2X? If you own an automated factory that produces anything you want, you don't need other people to buy (consume) any of your resources.
If someone can own the whole world and have anything you want at the snap of your finger, you don't need any sort of human economy doing other things that take away your resources for reasons that are suboptimal to you
But it is likely not the path it will take. While there is a certain tendency towards centralization ( 1 person owning everything ), the future, as described, both touches on something very important ( why are we doing what we are doing ) and completely misses the likely result of suboptimal behavior of others ( balkanization, war and other like human behavior, but with robots fighting for those resources ). In other words, it will be closer to the world of Hiro Protagonist, where individual local factions and actors are way more powerful as embodied by the 'Sovereign'.
FWIW, I find this like of thinking fascinating even if I disagree with conclusion.
It doesn’t need to be one person. Even 1 thousand people who have everything they need from vast swaths of land and automated machinery need nothing from the rest of the billions. There’s no inherent need for others to buy if they offer nothing to the 1000 owners
Then we are back to individual kingdoms and hordes of unwashed masses sloshing between them in search of easy pickings. The owners might not need their work, but the masses will need to eat. I think sometimes people forget how much of a delicate balance current civilization depends on.
With so many subscriptions for everything these days, I'm turning back to good old books to educate the kids. You pay once, they don't disappear after reading unlike in Fallout games, so you can reuse them with all the kids :). Helping them enjoy reading early really makes a lasting difference!
