What happens to economics in a futuristic world?

[Adam Griffin]

Machines, robots, computers and algorithms will sooner or later be able to not only do everything that we can do, but they will do them better and at less cost under the current economic system. Those who think machines are just going to be better manufacturers than us ignore the reality we're facing within a few decades where they'll also be better writers, poets and artists. The need for human employment will eventually disappear entirely - it's just a matter of time and/or how long it takes virtual and artificial intelligence to become feasible, complex and commonplace. Humans from an economic standpoint will become obsolete.

This is already happening: we're likely at a record level already in terms of percentage of the global population who wants to work but cannot realistically find employment or a way of life that sustains their basic needs. It's only going to get exponentially worse in the coming decades. I really don't think we're that far off from a majority of humanity literally being incapable of obtaining employment, regardless of skill or education. The only good news in this is that such a system would be hard to maintain unless society at-large was living under an entirely different economic system (i.e. "free money"); otherwise, even the people who own the machines won't be able to earn tangible profit off of them, whether robots are more cost-efficient than humans or not.

[Adam Griffin]

^^^ And to anyone who says something along the lines of "every great economic revolution has always displaced workers but created demand for new industries that employed the displaced": yeah, there will be demand for new products and services...which will also be fulfilled by the same technologies that displaced people in the first place. We've never had one of these revolutions before where the upset was caused by something more intelligent and capable than ourselves. The cause of the displacement and that which inherits the new jobs created by it will be one and the same for the first time in human history. This is all encompassing and far too exponential in growth to allow for any adjusting along historical lines.