if robots are able to drastically eliminate the need to pay human beings to provide physical goods and services, then there’ll be plenty of people with plenty of time and their hands to create cultural goods for free.
We’re talking about a future in which there’s neither a shortage of goods nor a shortage of people. We’re talking, in other words, about utopia. For whatever reason, optimism is coded as a rightwing attitude in the contemporary United States, but people with their origins on the right ought to recognize these trends as the abundance of goods that makes it both possible and necessary to transcend capitalism and move to a world of from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Market exchange is a response to scarcity, and in many domains we’re moving past scarcity.
From Robots and Utopia
SciFi fantasies aside, there will still be some shortages in some types of goods. Likely goods that we can’t yet imagine.
