You can't really just throw money at the demand side of the equation and expect everything else to stay the same. Supply side will raise their prices because they can (when everyone's got $10M in the bank, why not charge $50, $500 or even $5,000 for a loaf of artisan bread? And eventually other producers of bread follow suit because the consumer has become less price sensitive).
If you want to improve everyone's standard of living, what has repeatedly worked throughout history is to lower the cost of production through technology, and ensure there's lots of competition on the supply side. With enough competition, producers are unable to behave like a cartel. Eventually someone cracks and sacrifices part of their margin to attract more customers, and then a price war ensues. A textbook example is salt, which for most of human history was quite expensive, but after mechanized mining techniques were developed it became so cheap that for the average household it's practically free.
Technology + competition. At this moment in history we're quite good at the technology part of the equation but we have allowed many monopolies and oligopolies to form, so we're struggling at the competition part.
Money is the measure of the productive capacity of an economy. If you increase the money without increasing the capacity then you get inflation. But let's be charitable and assume that "Gud" was talking about increasing the capacity commensurately. Because that's what's happening. AI, robots and almost zero marginal cost green energy are going to increase the productive capacity of economies dramatically over the next decade or two.
Oh boy, maybe much much later on, 15-30 years from now if we're lucky, and maybe just the opposite. But as for coming decade? Forget it. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2023.p...
You might have that argument with nuclear energy, because most of the cost is upfront. But approval process for that will have to be expedited by congress.
Natural monopolies certainly exist in sectors of the economy like public utilities, but I don't think they are so strong in tech.
...and what will happen when every single person goes and tries to buy a 50" TV? Hm? Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine?
Come on... this is Real Life, not Magical Fairy Land.
We're not talking about a magical cornucopia that generates an endless amount of physical goods that can be used to accommodate the needs of every person.
We're very specifically talking here about technological shift that will eliminate a large pool of skilled jobs.
People will still need jobs, or they will become homeless / starve / have to leave the country.
AI is not going to feed the world any time soon.
Naturally this is purely hypothetical, parent argued that work gives meaning to life(which I generally agree with). I argued you can still be working, even if less efficiently than the machines.
Maybe it will be a gradual change. Agriculture and manufacturing is already highly automated, for better or worse.
In principal you're right, we can in theory live like you suggest and expand on leisure culture / volunteering / 'made up' jobs by the government.
In practice, we're super far from the utopia. Energy is expensive, food is expensive, housing is expensive in ChatGPT can't do squat about it. What it CAN do is possibly replace me as a worker. So that's the conundrum.
I mean ... we already have 3D printing, and car making robots, and electronics making robots. Most of the TV is robots.
All that's needed is the equivalent of 3D printing that adds an extra step of "TV-making-robot"-making robots. One reason we don't have that is that it turns out the robot making robot costs more than certain as-yet non-globalized labor markets.
It's not that we can't, it's that the ROE is bad.
What you're saying was already true... so what. Now people are unemployed because of GPT4 we're going to start making free TVs for everyone?
Dang. That's sure not what happened when all those people lost their jobs during covid (eg. restaurant staff).
I guess this time will be different?
That's uh... well, very optimistic.
