The only thing that automation does is decrease the cost of things you can have towards zero. Everything else is the same.
It used to be that fresh fruits were rare, sometimes even priceless. A huge number of people were required to grow, tend, harvest, transport, and sell fruit, especially in the off-months.
That's all automated now. So the price of fresh fruit is tending towards zero. All of those people are not that doing that any more. Those people are still working, just not in jobs that are as heavily automated.
There will always be something you cannot automate. Because you can't, it will be expensive. Because it is expensive, people will want it. It is not logical, but it is the way our species operates. So people do stuff, other people like it, then it's automated, then they find other stuff to do that's harder to automate.
If your thesis is that there is some sort of universal automation coming? Maybe 300-500 years out, when the Great Singularity occurs (because these two events are the same thing). But no time soon.
I will grant you that we currently have no freaking idea of what the economy in 2050 will look like. I believe this is the cool part of being mortal in our age -- things are always so goddamned different between when you're born and when you die.
Automation doesn't reduce costs toward zero. It reduces them toward their irreduceable inputs.
It's a bit like Amdahl's Law of Parallelisation.
In some cases, that irreducible input is fairly small -- microchips and software can do a great deal (though at scale, they also represent some of the most expensive, and energy-hungry systems we've ever built).
In others ... not so much. Heating water from 0C to 100C will always take 100 calories per gram (and markedly more to convert it to steam). Casting a 22 kg iron weightlifting plate will require 22 kg of iron (and all its embedded energy). Food has its inputs, including sunlight, water, nugrients, land, topsoil, pest control, sowing, and harvesting. You might move that into a lab (I tend to doubt that), but there's still going to be some irreduceable residual.
(Actually, the story may be far worse in that we've taken a system which produces 2-8x the human labour energy inputs to one which consumes 5-10x the food energy output, largely as fossil fuels. Discounting soil and nutrient inputs.)
I strongly suspect your fruit prices are asymptotically approaching some lower bound other than zero.
Speak for yourself. I'd rather have something high-quality and defect-free, rather than something slapped together by some tired and disinterested human.
Perhaps you misunderstand the nature of this argument.
I don't have to be right all the time. I'm not saying that everything that can't be automated will automatically get more expensive. It's only necessary that some things do.
Actually it's necessary that enough, if not most, things do, else the lost jobs will be lost forever.
But you're worse mistaken than just in quantity: there's no mechanism to make things that can't be automated more expensive. If anything it's exactly the opposite: they'll become cheaper and more plentiful:
a) automation removes N jobs
b) people who previously did those jobs turn to whatever they can find -- and they mainly turn to do what can't be automated.
c) we now have MORE people doing what can't be automated: the people that were already doing it before automation, and the people who lost their jobs and turned to "doing things that can't be automated".
d) Abundance of workers making those things (or offering those services), drives labour costs down, fills the market with those things/services and makes things/services that can't be automated get more devalued.
I didn't ask you to be right all the time, you set that bar up yourself by claiming that things that couldn't get automated would get more rare.
I just gave you an example of something that wouldn't get more expensive even if AI couldn't do it. And now that I think of it I am struggling to find anything that will get more more scarce if AI do almost everything else. That just means more humans, more potential competition and thus less rare.
Perhaps DanielBMarkham is an advocate for Basic Income?
Because in a world where we've automated away most of the good jobs and the threat of no job means being destitute and on the street, your argument that house cleaners become abundant seems irrefutable.
In a world where I balance my dislike for cleaning toilets with my desire for a slightly larger share of the robot-generated bounty, it's not clear there would be an over supply of house cleaners.
It used to be that fresh fruits were rare, sometimes even priceless. A huge number of people were required to grow, tend, harvest, transport, and sell fruit, especially in the off-months.
That's all automated now. So the price of fresh fruit is tending towards zero. All of those people are not that doing that any more. Those people are still working, just not in jobs that are as heavily automated.
There will always be something you cannot automate. Because you can't, it will be expensive. Because it is expensive, people will want it. It is not logical, but it is the way our species operates. So people do stuff, other people like it, then it's automated, then they find other stuff to do that's harder to automate.
If your thesis is that there is some sort of universal automation coming? Maybe 300-500 years out, when the Great Singularity occurs (because these two events are the same thing). But no time soon.
I will grant you that we currently have no freaking idea of what the economy in 2050 will look like. I believe this is the cool part of being mortal in our age -- things are always so goddamned different between when you're born and when you die.