An energy-based science fiction economy

[Duckie]

People don't work since between AI and advanced robotics all labor can essentially be handled. The only real positions left available would be those that require "human creativity"* since human intelligence has already been outstripped. Although to be perfectly honest I doubt a human is going to be coming up with something an AI couldn't. We already have genetic algorithm based engineering programs that can come up with designs better than human engineers and the human engineers have difficulty figuring them out, they just know they work. So, your incentive program to keep people entertained/working would have to revolve around getting them to do things that are good for them in the first place (eating right, exercising, continuning their education even if its not necessarily something productive, etc) or creating things others can enjoy (producing art, literature, etc). Add in a certain amount of social stigma that makes it seem wrong to just be a leach on the system and enjoy basic housing, food, clothing, etc so people want to actually do those things and just natural human competitiveness will keep people going. The AIs can measure this simply through how many non-basic (i.e. provided by the government) resources are used up per capita.

The Luxury Service industry will still exist, because unlike AIs there's a more strictly limited number of them and they can't be programmed to find your desires as important as their own (not as easily anyway). Getting served by a human waiter or fucked by a human prostitute or, despite what you'd think nowadays, helped by human tech support (with a subtle link to a skilled expert system in this person's ear, naturally, so she's almost as skilled as the computers) will always be valuable even after the robots are better at it. "Home Made" always fetches a better price than factory made, just like a letter is more formal than an email for no particular reason. Marketing will just have to remind people that sleeping with a real human, or getting a real human to wait on your desires, or whatnot, is superior because it's classy and expensive even if it's from a naive point of view inefficient, inferior, and perhaps even morally questionable in some cases. Like using real Diamonds instead of artificial ones.

Unless there's huge cultural changes that make people work differently. But people aren't practical- lots of things are eaten because they're rare even though rich people might divorced from context like a cheeseburger more*, or expensive because they're rare or hard to do or awkward to do even with no logical reason to do them. In practice, the big difference will be that all work in a futuristic economy (where robots can do everything better and people have a comfortable basic living stipend without work) will be part performance art and little utility. People would only work if they enjoy it- there's no need to be a prostitute or a waiter or a masseuse or a novelist or whatnot unless you like it, and people will only consume human-made anything for aesthetic reasons.

Assuming people 'buy' anything at all, but barter (sort of), favour, and gift based economies all work even post-scarcity. Even if they could replicate one themselves right now with an expert system designing the prose, giving someone a hand-written love letter is more aesthetic and emotionally important to humans, so it'd fetch a higher abstract gift value (and thus 'price'). Similarly, replicated cultural artefacts vs real, authentic cultural artefacts.

*For that matter, wine tastes better the more expensive it is, regardless of its actual origin in most cases. People insist real diamonds look shinier. People swear that no matter what, home-made cookies made with love taste better than industrial factory cookies made with the same recipe. It's just how we are, and that's why people will still desire human made products and thus produce work. (Humans will desire to work because despite what everyone figures, give a man a completely well supported living and odds are he still does something instead of sitting around eating and watching TV all day. It'll usually be less practical, though, like art or writing or self-cultivation of martial arts instead of 'fix someone else's plumbing', but it could be practical like 'make someone else's life better'. In an economy where robots are better, there'll just be less people being doctors (because dobots do it better) and more humans being service employees or even a few luxury fake doctors who provide human smiling faces on top of the robot-made cures and diagnoses. We all have goals and projects, unless we're afflicted by ennui that tends to come from using all our efforts on someone else's plumbing just to live in the first place.).

Come to think, weirdly, there might be a middle class industry of human-replicoids that make it almost like you're getting a human-made product but without the expense (value exists even in a moneyless gift economy, remember). To provide a fake 'human doctor' who would be a fake doctor just listening to the expert systems' judgments in the first place. Nobody ever said modern advertising made sense, where clothes can go up in value because of whose name is written on them (a guy who didn't really design them even though we all pretend he did), and the future will be even weirder.

[Duckie]

Ghetto Edit- There'd presumably also be both products that look human made, with noticeable imperfections and whatnot. (I once bought a desk and thought it was the coolest damn thing when I realized the irregularities and nicks from construction were actually repeating scratches made by machine that were just rotated in a complicated pattern, and my shower's 'stone' looking interior actually has the same repeating patterns rotated, cropped, flipped, etc. if you look closely. Robots in the future would be much better at hiding it, while giving the same 'natural' look (whether that be 'nonsynthetic material' or 'human produced') for cheaper prices than real quarried stone or real handmade furniture. Or products that are "human made" in the same way as cars are made in america (all the product pieces are made in foreign lands, but shipped to america and assembled on american soil- consider something like "Fresh home-made cookies. Baking supervised by humans!" or whatnot).

These would presumably be, like the 'natural looking' products or fake-organic products or handmade-looking purses that are imperfect by design, middle class products for people who can't afford the real luxury of paying for the highly limited and awkward-to-produce products that the rich consume for their aesthetic purposes.

Some people might find this idea kind of terrifying, but I think it's fascinating. And it's nice to know there'll always be a reason for humans to be kept around, and humans to do work, even if humanity is completely obsolete by some future revolution. The idea that if robots do something better or artificial does something better, natural is obsolete, is as dumb and archaic an idea as the idea that perfect regularity would make cities perfect (we mostly build organic, natural feeling designs in modern, well-made cities- the previous ideas made suburbia) or that mankind will surpass nature and replace it with perfect technology (our technology is getting more natural even as nature gets more influenced by technology, and we are increasingly not trying to destroy nature and replace it with man, but to harmonize them). Such 19th century 'triumph of the technoman' thinking is outmoded.

That was overly long and rambling and perhaps a bit tangential, but the bottom line is, you don't need money in an economy where all human work is luxury, it'd go to abstract, less quantified gift-based like our modern social economy already is, and I theorize that post-material-scarcity, human attention and true emotional caring or desire to exchange mutual gifts would be the only resource still scarce. But you would still even post-scarcity have a reason for people to do things, so mankind would still have an economic system of some kind to interact with eachother to exchange those gifts of our affections and interests and whatnot. Even Gods don't sit alone in solipsistic rooms, subsisting.