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ewbrownv comments on Politics Discussion Thread February 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: OrphanWilde 06 February 2013 09:33PM

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Comment author: ewbrownv 08 February 2013 06:47:05PM 2 points [-]

Historically it has never worked out that way. When a society gets richer the people eat more and better food, buy more clothes, live in bigger houses, buy cars and appliances, travel more, and so on. Based on the behavior of rich people we can see that a x10 or even x100 increase from current wealth levels due to automation would just continue this trend, with people spending the excess on things like mansions, private jets and a legion of robot servants.

Realistically there's probably some upper limit to human consumption, but it's so far above current production levels that we don't see much hint of where it would be yet. So for most practical purposes we can assume demand is infinite until we actually see the rich start systematically running out of things to spend money on.