Abundance

I've been thinking about what happens if robotics becomes good enough that most physical production can be automated. Almost everything we consume is ultimately mined or grown for free, and much of its price comes from the human effort involved in the process in between. If machines can do most of that work, including producing and repairing much of the capital they depend on, the marginal cost of many goods should fall dramatically, possibly close to zero.

For most of human history, a large share of human activity has been organized around securing material needs. The history of technology is partly the history of reducing the amount of human effort required to satisfy them. General robotics would push that process much further, from making labor more productive to removing labor from large parts of production altogether.

The resources themselves do not need to be infinite. Productive capacity only needs to become large enough relative to demand that another unit carries almost no opportunity cost. Air is finite and effectively free. There is no obvious reason that food, energy, clothing, electronics, and much of the physical economy could not eventually approach the same condition.

Scarcity would become concentrated in things that cannot easily be reproduced: particular locations, time, access, status, political power, unique objects. Prices would increasingly reflect scarcity in these things rather than the cost of producing ordinary goods.

A large amount of human effort already exists outside material necessity. Wealth, retirement, sport, scholarship, art, competition, and exploration all suggest that ambition persists once subsistence becomes irrelevant. A society with much weaker material constraints would probably preserve that ambition while changing what it is directed toward.

There is some physical limit to how much life Earth can support, but I suspect it is far above our current population. More importantly, I think humanity is more likely to become interplanetary and gain access to new resources before approaching any absolute terrestrial ceiling.