On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 04:54:16PM -0700, Jim Vassilakos wrote:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy) where,
> presumably, the state is the only meaningful employer and pretty
> much decides who gets what.

More likely, expanding production will still take significant labour.
Not so much physical labour, but definitely mental labour handling all
the innumerable complexities and problems involved in any major new
operation.  Eliminating this requirement would probably require strong
AI, which is a lot more than just automation and opens a whole other
can of worms.

The other factor is that people buying these goods will only do so to
the extent that it's worth more to them then the services and
non-automatable (including immaterial) goods that they might otherwise
purchase.  A major trend we've been seeing in the last hundred years
in industrialized nations is a shift from spending on physical goods
to immaterial goods and services.  Even in just the last 10 years,
proportion of income spent on physical goods has decreased from about
26% to 20% of household expenditure in the UK, and similar figures
seem to apply in other developed nations.  This has corresponded with
a comparable rise in spending on services and non-material goods.
Most of the latter will not be reasonably automated for the
foreseeable future.

So although automation does facilitate concentration of wealth, it
appears to be fairly self-limiting in practice due to the finite
demand for such goods.  Most of the world's richest billionaires
derived their fortunes from services: software, financial,
telecommunication, advertising, social networking, and design
services.  Many of the rest got there through owning retail chains
(not factories), and only a few through actual production of goods.

It's similar in terms of corporate profits, with Apple as the major
exception.  Even then, a large fraction of its profits came from
services provided rather than material goods sold.  Most of the top 20
profitable corporations primarily provide services or intangible
goods, and virtually none control the means of production for the
goods they sell.

So in short, I don't see that widespread automation would have the
economic and political effects that are being discussed here.  The
rich are getting richer faster than the poor are, but I'm pretty sure
that it's not due to automation, except as a side-effect of automation
leading to a greater surplus of wealth for them to acquire.

In the real world, this probably won't continue for very long.  We are
starting to run into resource limits in an ever-increasing breadth of
areas.  In Traveller however, technology alleviates almost all of
them, so growth could continue for very much longer.  One of the main
things that strikes me about Traveller's setting is not how large it
is, but how small and sparse it is after so many thousands of years.

- Tim