How AI, Robotics, and Clean Energy Will End Labor and Money – A Future Where Everything Is Free

[BigMike]

Imagine a world where work, as we know it, is obsolete. Not because people have gotten lazy, but because machines—powered by clean, limitless energy and guided by artificial intelligence—have made human labor unnecessary.

We're standing at the edge of a historic convergence:
- Artificial intelligence is already outpacing human capability in decision-making, diagnostics, logistics, and creative problem-solving.
- Robotics is rapidly evolving to handle physical tasks—from farming and construction to caregiving and manufacturing.
- Clean, renewable energy (think solar, fusion, advanced storage) is on track to become so abundant that energy becomes practically free.

Now put those three forces together. What do you get?

A system where every good and service can be produced without human input, without pollution, and without the constraint of labor costs. The natural consequence of this is profound: money becomes meaningless.

Why would you pay for something if:
1. The machines that make it don’t require a wage?
2. The energy that powers them is free?
3. The materials are recycled or synthesized infinitely?

In such a world, scarcity disappears—not because we've found a moral solution, but because we've found a technological one.

This is not utopia. This is physics, economics, and engineering catching up with our imagination.

But here's the question I’d like to pose to the forum:
If everything becomes free because there’s no longer any cost structure behind production, how do we rethink human purpose, governance, and ethics in a post-labor, post-money world?

Is the elimination of work a liberation or a loss?
Can human dignity survive without the struggle for survival?
And do our current systems of government, law, and morality survive this shift—or do they collapse and get replaced?

Let’s talk.

[BigMike]

I want to push the conversation a little further—not into sci-fi speculation, but into the hard logic of cause and effect.

Let’s say you’re skeptical. That’s fair. But ask yourself: What exactly are jobs? They're not inherently meaningful activities. They're tasks people do because other people won’t—or can’t—do them for free. The only reason you’re paid is because your labor fills a need that isn’t yet automated or fulfilled by nature. So if machines can do the work, and energy costs vanish, and goods become abundant... what’s left to pay for?

Money doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a rationing tool—a workaround for scarcity. But if scarcity ends, money doesn’t just become unnecessary; it becomes an obstacle. You can’t charge rent if no one needs shelter built by humans. You can’t sell food if vertical farms run by AI feed everyone. You can’t “own” labor if there’s no laborer.

People will say: “But someone still owns the machines!” Sure—for a while. But think about what ownership even means when maintenance, distribution, and production are handled by self-replicating systems. When enforcement becomes ethically and economically unjustifiable, what does “ownership” even look like? It collapses under its own absurdity.

The deeper issue here—the one that keeps me up—is how long we try to prop up outdated systems just to avoid the inevitable. Do we let automation enrich only the few? Or do we finally admit that the end of work means the end of transactional society?

Because if we don't need to work to live, then the logic of markets, wages, and wealth hoarding falls apart. And if we cling to it anyway, we’re not preserving civilization—we’re preventing its evolution.

So again, I ask: What replaces it?
And what does it mean to be human when survival is no longer a job?

[FlashDangerpants]

I recommend you read Keynes' Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930 and making certain predictions about life and work in the 1970s. Famous in part for not coming true at all, but actually highly prescient and in a sense completely correct.

It's a short paper at 7 pages
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

What it teaches us is that we can correctly predict that future society will have a vastly more productive economy than today's, but we don't have any means to predict what goods and services might become available and therefore we don't have a viable way to predict how they will distribute and allocate time, work and so on.

The Star Trek future where all scarcity has ended is a very distant prospect. AI that is smart enough to run the whole world as a benevolent dictator making all decisions and managing all supply chains for us is not practicably on the horizon.

Think of it this way: Google started the whole self-driving car hype almost 20 years ago and back then everyone thought that all the real problems involved would be fixed by 2020. All that happened in reality was that the easy problems got fixed real fast, and then new reasons why some of the other problems would turn out to be difficult were discovered. We are a decade late with self-driving taxis that can only operate on a specific set of roads that they have been carefully set up for. These things always turn out more complicated than they seemed before we started.

Similarly, Keynes didn't predict colour TV sets watching moon landings (and adverts); cheap international holidays; home computers; online gambling addictions and all the other things that make us unwilling to to work only so many hours as are required to live a 1930s lifestyle, how could he? Similarly he didn't have any way to predict all the new types of job those things would create, he just knew that a lot of the old ones would go.

In the century since he wrote, the profession of Travel Agent went from a tiny niche occupation to a major industry employing millions worldwide and back to tiny niche again. A good understanding of how all of that happened would help analyse the likelihood of our society, or anything resembling it actually giving up on the idea of work.

[Flannel Jesus]

So again, I ask: What replaces it?
And what does it mean to be human when survival is no longer a job?

Either a famine that makes the poor near-extinct, or an extreme form of financial redistribution style government.

[FlashDangerpants]

So again, I ask: What replaces it?
And what does it mean to be human when survival is no longer a job?

Either a famine that makes the poor near-extinct, or an extreme form of financial redistribution style government.

The point is that neither of those are available outcomes. Food and daily basics are no longer scarce in the scenario provided, so famine is effectively impossible and redistribution is not required - redistributive economies redistribute something that is scarce from those who have more than plenty to those who need. Post-scarcity, everybody has access to plenty.

The things is, only incremental improvements to productivity over a reasonable period of time are needed for food, energy and other products to become cheap enough that scarcity effectively ends. You don't need a sci-fi scenario for that. But human work product that machines can't do very well (cutting hair, scripts for TV shows, and of course vajazzles) are things that people do for work and get paid for. Big Mike seems to be assigning all those jobs to computers as well.

The thing with Big Mike is that he gets carried away. He is a born salesman and what he likes to sell is a big vision.

[BigMike]

I recommend you read Keynes' Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930 and making certain predictions about life and work in the 1970s. Famous in part for not coming true at all, but actually highly prescient and in a sense completely correct.

It's a short paper at 7 pages
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

What it teaches us is that we can correctly predict that future society will have a vastly more productive economy than today's, but we don't have any means to predict what goods and services might become available and therefore we don't have a viable way to predict how they will distribute and allocate time, work and so on.

The Star Trek future where all scarcity has ended is a very distant prospect. AI that is smart enough to run the whole world as a benevolent dictator making all decisions and managing all supply chains for us is not practicably on the horizon.

Think of it this way: Google started the whole self-driving car hype almost 20 years ago and back then everyone thought that all the real problems involved would be fixed by 2020. All that happened in reality was that the easy problems got fixed real fast, and then new reasons why some of the other problems would turn out to be difficult were discovered. We are a decade late with self-driving taxis that can only operate on a specific set of roads that they have been carefully set up for. These things always turn out more complicated than they seemed before we started.

Similarly, Keynes didn't predict colour TV sets watching moon landings (and adverts); cheap international holidays; home computers; online gambling addictions and all the other things that make us unwilling to to work only so many hours as are required to live a 1930s lifestyle, how could he? Similarly he didn't have any way to predict all the new types of job those things would create, he just knew that a lot of the old ones would go.

In the century since he wrote, the profession of Travel Agent went from a tiny niche occupation to a major industry employing millions worldwide and back to tiny niche again. A good understanding of how all of that happened would help analyse the likelihood of our society, or anything resembling it actually giving up on the idea of work.

Thanks—Keynes' essay is a classic, and you're right, it’s remarkably insightful and off the mark in some key ways. But I think we’re past the era of just "new jobs replacing old ones." What’s emerging now isn’t just another wave of economic evolution—it’s the end of the job paradigm itself. Not a shift in types of work, but a collapse of the need for human labor in production at all. That’s not a tweak to capitalism; that’s a civilizational reset.

[BigMike]

So again, I ask: What replaces it?
And what does it mean to be human when survival is no longer a job?

Either a famine that makes the poor near-extinct, or an extreme form of financial redistribution style government.

The point is that neither of those are available outcomes. Food and daily basics are no longer scarce in the scenario provided, so famine is effectively impossible and redistribution is not required - redistributive economies redistribute something that is scarce from those who have more than plenty to those who need. Post-scarcity, everybody has access to plenty.

The things is, only incremental improvements to productivity over a reasonable period of time are needed for food, energy and other products to become cheap enough that scarcity effectively ends. You don't need a sci-fi scenario for that. But human work product that machines can't do very well (cutting hair, scripts for TV shows, and of course vajazzles) are things that people do for work and get paid for. Big Mike seems to be assigning all those jobs to computers as well.

The thing with Big Mike is that he gets carried away. He is a born salesman and what he likes to sell is a big vision.

Guilty as charged—I do love a big vision. But it’s not hype for hype’s sake. I’m not talking about replacing every quirky, artisanal job with a robot. I’m saying the economic need to work is disappearing, regardless of what niche tasks remain.

In a world where your shelter, food, healthcare, and essentials are all handled by autonomous systems at zero marginal cost, the fact that someone can still cut hair or paint murals for money becomes irrelevant to survival. That’s the shift: from work-to-live to live-then-choose-if-you-want-to-work.

The question isn’t whether humans can still do human things. It’s whether we’re finally free to do them without a paycheck justifying our existence.

[accelafine]

Lose the horrible American offenglish and you might be more convincing.

[BigMike]

Lose the horrible American offenglish and you might be a bit more convincing.

Fair enough—I get that style can be distracting. But if you can set that aside for a moment, I’d really like to know your thoughts on the actual argument.

[accelafine]

I can't set it aside. All I see is the word 'gotten'

[phyllo]

In such a world, scarcity disappears—not because we've found a moral solution, but because we've found a technological one.

Scarcity won't end because we are living on a planet with limited resources.

I'm not great at predicting the future but I tend to think that production of stuff will increase to satisfy the needs of a bored population with expectations of "living life to the fullest". Think big houses, furniture, cars, planes, boats, ATVs, motorcycles, personal 'toys' of all descriptions . You can have all the stuff that you don't use and don't need. It will look like it costs nothing to "have it all".

And the planet will be stripped bare.

[BigMike]

In such a world, scarcity disappears—not because we've found a moral solution, but because we've found a technological one.

Scarcity won't end because we are living on a planet with limited resources.

I'm not great at predicting the future but I tend to think that production of stuff will increase to satisfy the needs of a bored population with expectations of "living life to the fullest". Think big houses, furniture, cars, planes, boats, ATVs, motorcycles, personal 'toys' of all descriptions . You can have all the stuff that you don't use and don't need. It will look like it costs nothing to "have it all".

And the planet will be stripped bare.

Thanks, Phyllo. That’s a really thoughtful concern, and I want to go through your points carefully, one by one:

1. “Scarcity won't end because we are living on a planet with limited resources.”
You're absolutely right—physical scarcity still exists in theory. The planet has boundaries. But the argument here is about functional scarcity, the kind that shapes economic behavior. If AI and robotics, powered by clean energy, can recycle materials at near-total efficiency, synthesize alternatives to rare elements, and optimize use far better than we can, then scarcity as a daily human constraint fades. It’s not that limits disappear—it’s that they stop being the defining pressure on human survival and well-being.

2. “Production of stuff will increase to satisfy the needs of a bored population with expectations of ‘living life to the fullest’... think big houses, boats, ATVs, etc.”
Yes, absolutely—and that’s one of the real risks. If we treat abundance as permission to binge on material excess, then we just shift the problem: from scarcity to waste. That’s why the vision I’m arguing for also implies a cultural evolution. Not just freeing people from labor, but cultivating new values—meaning over materialism, sustainability over status. The future can’t be just about “having it all.” It has to be about learning how to live well without stripping the biosphere.

3. “And the planet will be stripped bare.”
Only if we allow the same incentive structures that brought us to the brink today to define that future. But in a post-money world—where production isn’t driven by profit but by need, by curiosity, by collective decision-making—there’s an opening to do better. The same systems that can automate everything can also track environmental impact down to the molecule. That doesn’t guarantee we’ll make smart choices. But it gives us the tools to. And if we keep the conversation open and honest now, we have a shot at laying that foundation before it’s too late.

So I don’t think your concerns contradict the vision—I think they refine it. The goal isn’t blind abundance. It’s intelligent abundance. And that’s a challenge worth grappling with together.

[accelafine]

In such a world, scarcity disappears—not because we've found a moral solution, but because we've found a technological one.

Scarcity won't end because we are living on a planet with limited resources.

I'm not great at predicting the future but I tend to think that production of stuff will increase to satisfy the needs of a bored population with expectations of "living life to the fullest". Think big houses, furniture, cars, planes, boats, ATVs, motorcycles, personal 'toys' of all descriptions . You can have all the stuff that you don't use and don't need. It will look like it costs nothing to "have it all".

And the planet will be stripped bare.

Thanks, Phyllo. That’s a really thoughtful concern, and I want to go through your points carefully, one by one:

1. “Scarcity won't end because we are living on a planet with limited resources.”
You're absolutely right—physical scarcity still exists in theory. The planet has boundaries. But the argument here is about functional scarcity, the kind that shapes economic behavior. If AI and robotics, powered by clean energy, can recycle materials at near-total efficiency, synthesize alternatives to rare elements, and optimize use far better than we can, then scarcity as a daily human constraint fades. It’s not that limits disappear—it’s that they stop being the defining pressure on human survival and well-being.

2. “Production of stuff will increase to satisfy the needs of a bored population with expectations of ‘living life to the fullest’... think big houses, boats, ATVs, etc.”
Yes, absolutely—and that’s one of the real risks. If we treat abundance as permission to binge on material excess, then we just shift the problem: from scarcity to waste. That’s why the vision I’m arguing for also implies a cultural evolution. Not just freeing people from labor, but cultivating new values—meaning over materialism, sustainability over status. The future can’t be just about “having it all.” It has to be about learning how to live well without stripping the biosphere.

3. “And the planet will be stripped bare.”
Only if we allow the same incentive structures that brought us to the brink today to define that future. But in a post-money world—where production isn’t driven by profit but by need, by curiosity, by collective decision-making—there’s an opening to do better. The same systems that can automate everything can also track environmental impact down to the molecule. That doesn’t guarantee we’ll make smart choices. But it gives us the tools to. And if we keep the conversation open and honest now, we have a shot at laying that foundation before it’s too late.

So I don’t think your concerns contradict the vision—I think they refine it. The goal isn’t blind abundance. It’s intelligent abundance. And that’s a challenge worth grappling with together.

AI?

[BigMike]

Scarcity won't end because we are living on a planet with limited resources.

I'm not great at predicting the future but I tend to think that production of stuff will increase to satisfy the needs of a bored population with expectations of "living life to the fullest". Think big houses, furniture, cars, planes, boats, ATVs, motorcycles, personal 'toys' of all descriptions . You can have all the stuff that you don't use and don't need. It will look like it costs nothing to "have it all".

And the planet will be stripped bare.

Thanks, Phyllo. That’s a really thoughtful concern, and I want to go through your points carefully, one by one:

1. “Scarcity won't end because we are living on a planet with limited resources.”
You're absolutely right—physical scarcity still exists in theory. The planet has boundaries. But the argument here is about functional scarcity, the kind that shapes economic behavior. If AI and robotics, powered by clean energy, can recycle materials at near-total efficiency, synthesize alternatives to rare elements, and optimize use far better than we can, then scarcity as a daily human constraint fades. It’s not that limits disappear—it’s that they stop being the defining pressure on human survival and well-being.

2. “Production of stuff will increase to satisfy the needs of a bored population with expectations of ‘living life to the fullest’... think big houses, boats, ATVs, etc.”
Yes, absolutely—and that’s one of the real risks. If we treat abundance as permission to binge on material excess, then we just shift the problem: from scarcity to waste. That’s why the vision I’m arguing for also implies a cultural evolution. Not just freeing people from labor, but cultivating new values—meaning over materialism, sustainability over status. The future can’t be just about “having it all.” It has to be about learning how to live well without stripping the biosphere.

3. “And the planet will be stripped bare.”
Only if we allow the same incentive structures that brought us to the brink today to define that future. But in a post-money world—where production isn’t driven by profit but by need, by curiosity, by collective decision-making—there’s an opening to do better. The same systems that can automate everything can also track environmental impact down to the molecule. That doesn’t guarantee we’ll make smart choices. But it gives us the tools to. And if we keep the conversation open and honest now, we have a shot at laying that foundation before it’s too late.

So I don’t think your concerns contradict the vision—I think they refine it. The goal isn’t blind abundance. It’s intelligent abundance. And that’s a challenge worth grappling with together.

AI?

Yes—AI is central to this. Not as a magic wand, but as the engine that makes this kind of future possible in the first place.

We're talking about AI that can:

• Manage resources with far more precision than humans ever could,
• Coordinate massive logistics chains with zero waste,
• Design products optimized for durability, recyclability, and minimal impact,
• And—maybe most importantly—replace the need for most human labor in production, logistics, transportation, and administration.

Without AI, you’re right to be skeptical. But with it? We're not just automating work—we’re automating efficiency, sustainability, and abundance.

So yes: AI. That’s the pivot.

[Zenita01]

If we hit that point where machines do everything, and stuff becomes free, I think the real curveball is boredom. Not just in the “what do I do all day?” sense, but deep, existential boredom. Like, when survival’s not a thing and there’s no pressure to earn or hustle, what keeps people moving?

We might end up with a weird divide, not between rich and poor, but between people who create meaning and people who just float. You’d get folks diving into art, philosophy, space travel, digital worlds, not for money, but because it feels real. And others who just check out, living in auto-pilot because nothing demands their attention anymore.

So maybe the new “job” is actually figuring yourself out. Like emotional and psychological work becomes the new frontier