I wrote:
> Intelligent computers will design improved versions of the factories and > equipment. They will build or upgrade as many factories as needed without > human intervention. The production cost of the food will be as cheap per > kilogram as tap water is today. > Not just food, either. Hundreds of years from now, if you decide to tear down your house and build a brand new one, it will take less human effort than it now takes to deliver a pizza. The raw materials will be dirt-cheap. I mean literally as cheap as a dumptruck of dirt. For common elements such as carbon or iron, replicator machines will produce all objects at about the same cost per kilogram. (Assuming there is no industrial scale transmutation.) Overall I suppose a new house will cost a few hundred dollars and take a week to deliver. Regarding my projected cost of food, I said food will cost roughly as much as tap water today. I mean that water is the main ingredient of all food. Also, I mean it will take about as much machinery and human intervention as tap water takes. Tap water costs ~$1 per 500 gallons, or 4,000 lbs, or 1800 kg. The average person eats 5 lbs per day, so it comes to $0.50 per year. Okay, I may be off by a factor of 100, but it still will not be worth the effort to charge people $50 per year. Earlier I estimated that the total cost of supplying all necessities will be roughly equivalent to supplying tap water today. We use a lot of tap water in the U.S. The cost is $335 per year. I figure this will be roughly the cost of providing all of the necessities of life, such as food, rent for a reasonable amount of space, internet access, travel around the solar system, and so on. People who want to live in sprawling mansions or who want to commute every month to Mars may have to pay more, out of pocket. If we ask people to work to earn this money, and we pay them today's average salary, they will work for 3 days per year. That's absurd for several reasons: 1. Why bother? 2. Who is going to remember how to do a useful task that you perform only a few days a year? I guess if we are talking about cooking a Thanksgiving turkey I can remember how to do it, but that is not something anyone would pay me to do today. I am sure household robots in 500 years will do a better job cooking turkeys than I ever could. Something you do 3 days a year is a ritual, not a job. 3. What work are people going to do in competition with robots? Consider that 3 days of robot labor will cost a few pennies at most. I cannot imagine people doing intellectual tasks such as city planning in competition with supercomputer cogitation. People will make decisions about how we want our cities and transportation networks to look, and where to build a new airport, but computers will handle all the technical details. I doubt anyone will even understand the technology. There will still be important jobs for some people in the future. We will need decision makers, movers and shakers and politicians. Someone has to decide where to build the new airport, even if the machines handle all technical details. You can have any house you want in a week for a few hundred dollars, but there will still be zoning regulations and neighbors will still complain about houses. We will need parents, teachers and artists. We cannot let our children be raised by machines. I doubt there will be any doctors or gourmet cooks. I am certain there will be no taxi drivers, factory workers or farmers. Probably they will be gone in 50 years. The sooner the better. If you don't think so, you probably have not driven a taxi or worked on a farm. Having people do most kinds of work in the future would be like paying Post Office employees to deliver paper transcriptions of e-mail messages in today's world. That would be an absurd waste of time and resources. It would be such an annoyance for everyone, it would not even constitute "make-work." No one could even pretend there is a use for it. Having people do such idiotic tasks would be an insult to everyone involved, most of all the workers. It would be like paying people to dig holes with shovels and fill them up all day long. Putting aside economics, this world of the future will be an enormous challenge for the reasons described by George Orwell in "The Road to Wigan Pier." See: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200391.txt Starting here: "The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a couple of minutes. . . ." - Jed