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

[FlashDangerpants]

Nothing that requires 20% of all the electrical generation of the world for a couple of decades at least is economically inevitable unless it is inevitable that such a giant investment will be made for some reason. None of your explanations make sense.

[Alexis Jacobi]

At that point, the only real question left standing isn’t "How do we keep jobs?"
It's "How do we structure meaning, purpose, governance, and human dignity in a world where the struggle for survival is obsolete?"

By signing up for The 19-Week Email Course! How many times must I repeat this?!?

[BigMike]

Nothing that requires 20% of all the electrical generation of the world for a couple of decades at least is economically inevitable unless it is inevitable that such a giant investment will be made for some reason. None of your explanations make sense.

Alright, let's break this down carefully — because you’re still treating this as if it’s some single global megaproject that requires a conscious, coordinated decision to spend 20% of all world electricity on expanding solar. That’s not how it unfolds. At all.

No one needs to flip a master switch and say, “Let's all invest trillions right now!”
It happens incrementally, through millions of decentralized choices, because those choices make economic sense individually — even if no one consciously maps out the full system trajectory.

Here's the real-world dynamic:
Companies, municipalities, households — they install solar panels because it lowers their own bills.
Every solar panel you add pays for itself, plus a surplus, over its lifetime.
And once it's paid off (often in just 1–2 years today), the energy it produces is basically free for another 20–30 years.

That surplus energy isn’t just wasted. It feeds back into the economy, enabling more production, more investment, more automation.
It’s self-amplifying.
Each local, selfish decision to lower costs through solar or automation adds up to a global shift without anyone ever needing to "fund" 20% of the world’s grid up front.

That’s determinism at work.
It’s not a grand master plan.
It’s cause and effect, scaling through economic incentives — exactly the same way coal, oil, and industrialization spread without some 18th-century central planner drawing it up on parchment.

And about the giant investment you keep mentioning:
The payback time matters.
If something pays itself off in 2 years and generates pure profit (in energy terms) for another 20+, you don't need to force it.
Once the tipping point is reached (and in many sunny regions, it already is), it becomes a better investment than fossil fuels even before you start factoring in climate benefits.

In short:
- You’re thinking too much like an accountant running a massive central spreadsheet.
- The real world works like an ecosystem: self-reinforcing feedback loops, not top-down plans.

Nothing needs to be "inevitably decided."
It’s already inevitably happening.

And yes — the people losing their jobs will not sign off on it consciously.
But the jobs will disappear anyway, one after another, because firms who don't automate will get outcompeted by those who do.

That's how it has always worked.
That’s how it will work again — only faster, and far deeper this time.
And if we don’t prepare for it, we’re walking straight into a collapse we could have cushioned.

You’re asking for centralized logic in a decentralized process.
That’s why it sounds impossible to you.
But the future doesn't need your permission — it just needs momentum.
And it’s already gathering it.

[FlashDangerpants]

Nothing that requires 20% of all the electrical generation of the world for a couple of decades at least is economically inevitable unless it is inevitable that such a giant investment will be made for some reason. None of your explanations make sense.

Alright, let's break this down carefully — because you’re still treating this as if it’s some single global megaproject that requires a conscious, coordinated decision to spend 20% of all world electricity on expanding solar. That’s not how it unfolds. At all.

No one needs to flip a master switch and say, “Let's all invest trillions right now!”

But they do though. Many trillions. Trillions by the million.

Solar panels aren't made out of crystallized electricity, they cost money to make. Factories are needed, quite expensive ones because you really can't allow any dust into these facilities. And then afterwards, I don't know if you remember using this phrase, but you said there would be "Exponential expansion". So enormous cost expansion is included in that. A big chunk of every investment is reserved to power the next investment. Unless you didn't mean the exponential bit.

It happens incrementally, through millions of decentralized choices, because those choices make economic sense individually — even if no one consciously maps out the full system trajectory.

I don't think you understand how investment decisions are made. What you've written there, that's not it.

Here's the real-world dynamic:
Companies, municipalities, households — they install solar panels because it lowers their own bills.
Every solar panel you add pays for itself, plus a surplus, over its lifetime.
And once it's paid off (often in just 1–2 years today), the energy it produces is basically free for another 20–30 years.

That surplus energy isn’t just wasted. It feeds back into the economy, enabling more production, more investment, more automation.
It’s self-amplifying.
Each local, selfish decision to lower costs through solar or automation adds up to a global shift without anyone ever needing to "fund" 20% of the world’s grid up front.

Surplus electricity does go to waste. That's exactly what happens to it.

That’s determinism at work.
It’s not a grand master plan.
It’s cause and effect, scaling through economic incentives — exactly the same way coal, oil, and industrialization spread without some 18th-century central planner drawing it up on parchment.

When did you last see me bother with your determinism thread? I don't care about it and I will take the piss if you try to use it as a magic wand around me ever again.

And about the giant investment you keep mentioning:
The payback time matters.
If something pays itself off in 2 years and generates pure profit (in energy terms) for another 20+, you don't need to force it.
Once the tipping point is reached (and in many sunny regions, it already is), it becomes a better investment than fossil fuels even before you start factoring in climate benefits.

If money becomes meaningless only after and as a direct result of you having invested 700 trillion dollars in an absurd oversupply of electricity, the 700 trillion dollars needs accounting for.

In short:
- You’re thinking too much like an accountant running a massive central spreadsheet.
- The real world works like an ecosystem: self-reinforcing feedback loops, not top-down plans.

An you are thinking like you are playing a A badly written knock off version of Sim City.

[BigMike]

Nothing that requires 20% of all the electrical generation of the world for a couple of decades at least is economically inevitable unless it is inevitable that such a giant investment will be made for some reason. None of your explanations make sense.

Alright, let's break this down carefully — because you’re still treating this as if it’s some single global megaproject that requires a conscious, coordinated decision to spend 20% of all world electricity on expanding solar. That’s not how it unfolds. At all.

No one needs to flip a master switch and say, “Let's all invest trillions right now!”

But they do though. Many trillions. Trillions by the million.

Solar panels aren't made out of crystallized electricity, they cost money to make. Factories are needed, quite expensive ones because you really can't allow any dust into these facilities. And then afterwards, I don't know if you remember using this phrase, but you said there would be "Exponential expansion". So enormous cost expansion is included in that. A big chunk of every investment is reserved to power the next investment. Unless you didn't mean the exponential bit.

It happens incrementally, through millions of decentralized choices, because those choices make economic sense individually — even if no one consciously maps out the full system trajectory.

I don't think you understand how investment decisions are made. What you've written there, that's not it.

Here's the real-world dynamic:
Companies, municipalities, households — they install solar panels because it lowers their own bills.
Every solar panel you add pays for itself, plus a surplus, over its lifetime.
And once it's paid off (often in just 1–2 years today), the energy it produces is basically free for another 20–30 years.

That surplus energy isn’t just wasted. It feeds back into the economy, enabling more production, more investment, more automation.
It’s self-amplifying.
Each local, selfish decision to lower costs through solar or automation adds up to a global shift without anyone ever needing to "fund" 20% of the world’s grid up front.

Surplus electricity does go to waste. That's exactly what happens to it.

That’s determinism at work.
It’s not a grand master plan.
It’s cause and effect, scaling through economic incentives — exactly the same way coal, oil, and industrialization spread without some 18th-century central planner drawing it up on parchment.

When did you last see me bother with your determinism thread? I don't care about it and I will take the piss if you try to use it as a magic wand around me ever again.

And about the giant investment you keep mentioning:
The payback time matters.
If something pays itself off in 2 years and generates pure profit (in energy terms) for another 20+, you don't need to force it.
Once the tipping point is reached (and in many sunny regions, it already is), it becomes a better investment than fossil fuels even before you start factoring in climate benefits.

If money becomes meaningless only after and as a direct result of you have investing 700 trillion dollars in an absurd oversupply of electricity, the 700 trillion dollars needs accounting for.

In short:
- You’re thinking too much like an accountant running a massive central spreadsheet.
- The real world works like an ecosystem: self-reinforcing feedback loops, not top-down plans.

An you are thinking like you are playing a A badly written knock off version of Sim City.

Here’s the thing you’re still missing, and honestly, at this point it feels like you’re refusing to see it:

In the future I’m describing — not some Sci-Fi fantasy but a real, logical outcome of current technological trends — robots will mine the raw materials, refine them, assemble the parts and modules, ship them, install them, maintain them, and even decommission them after 30 years when their operational life ends.

And what powers the robots?
Electricity.
Generated by — wait for it — the very solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric plants, wave power, and geothermal stations they built.
Clean. Renewable. Self-sustaining.

The same energy that builds the infrastructure also fuels the next generation of infrastructure. It’s a feedback loop of real physical work, not just pushing dollars around a ledger.

You keep treating this like the current economy, where human labor and scarce resources dominate every cost structure.
That’s not the future we're heading toward.
In a world of automated labor + free energy, the cost base collapses.
Material needs become trivial to meet. The concept of “payback” in monetary terms eventually evaporates because nobody’s getting a wage, nobody’s billing for time, and the energy input is free.

In the long run — not tomorrow, but sometime after the late 2050s — 100% of the work of survival and material production will be done by machines, at marginal costs trending toward zero.

You say voters wouldn’t fund the first steps if they thought it would cost them their jobs.
But voters will lose their jobs — first 10%, then 30%, then 50%, then 80%, then 100%.
And at some point along that curve, there will be a moment of mass realization:
There’s no fighting the trend.
There’s only choosing whether we adapt or collapse.

Now, you’ve spent post after post jeering at me. Fine.
But maybe stop and ask yourself this, seriously:
If you think my vision is so broken, then what’s your solution to inevitable mass unemployment?

Because sitting around making snarky remarks while the walls come down is not a plan.

[FlashDangerpants]

Here’s the thing you’re still missing, and honestly, at this point it feels like you’re refusing to see it:

You are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?

[BigMike]

Here’s the thing you’re still missing, and honestly, at this point it feels like you’re refusing to see it:

You are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?

Alright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:

If you start with one solar panel today, and if that panel generates enough surplus energy to manufacture a new solar panel every 1.5 years — and then each new panel also starts doing the same — by the late 2050s, that one panel would have multiplied into about 6.7 million panels.

That's how exponential growth works.
It’s not trillions upfront, it’s compounding energy returns over time.
No master fund needs to dump a trillion dollars on day one.
The system amplifies itself because every unit added strengthens the base that adds even more units.

This isn't some utopian fantasy — it's the same growth curve you already saw with computing power, solar costs, battery technology, and even industrial agriculture over the last 50 years.

So no — I’m not claiming “nothing costs anything.”
I’m showing you that once a system crosses a critical efficiency threshold, it self-accelerates.
And you can either keep pretending that somehow physics, economics, and math will all freeze just to spare your worldview,
or you can wake up and realize:
This isn’t about what anyone “wants” — it’s about what’s happening.

[FlashDangerpants]

Here’s the thing you’re still missing, and honestly, at this point it feels like you’re refusing to see it:

You are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?

Alright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:

If you start with one solar panel today, and if that panel generates enough surplus energy to manufacture a new solar panel every 1.5 years — and then each new panel also starts doing the same — by the late 2050s, that one panel would have multiplied into about 6.7 million panels.

That's how exponential growth works.
It’s not trillions upfront, it’s compounding energy returns over time.
No master fund needs to dump a trillion dollars on day one.
The system amplifies itself because every unit added strengthens the base that adds even more units.

Excellent condescension, well done.

I don't know how to break this news to you.... solar panels aren't made out of electricity. They are made out of materials, materials which are acquired using a process we call "buying", often using this stuff called "money".

This isn't some utopian fantasy — it's the same growth curve you already saw with computing power, solar costs, battery technology, and even industrial agriculture over the last 50 years.

Even to the extent that those are true examples of exponential growth, I don't see how any of them undercuts continued investment in the way that your supposed solar power expansion does. Although if you don't understand the role of money in the whole thing I guess that would be lost on you. So think of it this way...

We don't take 50% of all the wheat we grow and replant in next season to gain exponential wheat growth until wheat loses all value. We don't have the land available, and we sort of don't really want wheat to be worthless. Also we don't want to cause a famine today in order to have worthless mountains of rotting wheat 20 years from now.

We don't pile 20% of Intel CPUs in a heap and tell them to make more CPUs for 20 years until dual core Xeon II CPUs are piled up to the moon and worthlessly orbiting the Earth. This is in part because we make CPUs in fabs not by just tasking piles of CPUs to make babies. But it's also because nobody wants to invest 20% of compute power today in providing a worthless excess of compute power in another 20 years, building fab after fab after fab for no reason else.

So no — I’m not claiming “nothing costs anything.”
I’m showing you that once a system crosses a critical efficiency threshold, it self-accelerates.
And you can either keep pretending that somehow physics, economics, and math will all freeze just to spare your worldview,
or you can wake up and realize:
This isn’t about what anyone “wants” — it’s about what’s happening.

The system you keep trying to describe as inevitable isn't self-assembling. 20 million solar cells don't copulate to create the eggs that grow into 20 million new factories to assemble solar cells. Somebody has to pay out a lot of money to build that. Nobody will do so if the solar market is oversupplied.

[BigMike]

You are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?

Alright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:

If you start with one solar panel today, and if that panel generates enough surplus energy to manufacture a new solar panel every 1.5 years — and then each new panel also starts doing the same — by the late 2050s, that one panel would have multiplied into about 6.7 million panels.

That's how exponential growth works.
It’s not trillions upfront, it’s compounding energy returns over time.
No master fund needs to dump a trillion dollars on day one.
The system amplifies itself because every unit added strengthens the base that adds even more units.

Excellent condescension, well done.

I don't know how to break this news to you.... solar panels aren't made out of electricity. They are made out of materials, materials which are acquired using a process we call "buying", often using this stuff called "money".

This isn't some utopian fantasy — it's the same growth curve you already saw with computing power, solar costs, battery technology, and even industrial agriculture over the last 50 years.

Even to the extent that those are true examples of exponential growth, I don't see how any of them undercuts continued investment in the way that your supposed solar power expansion does. Although if you don't understand the role of money in the whole thing I guess that would be lost on you. So think of it this way...

We don't take 50% of all the wheat we grow and replant in next season to gain exponential wheat growth until wheat loses all value. We don't have the land available, and we sort of don't really want wheat to be worthless. Also we don't want to cause a famine today in order to have worthless mountains of rotting wheat 20 years from now.

We don't pile 20% of Intel CPUs in a heap and tell them to make more CPUs for 20 years until dual core Xeon II CPUs are piled up to the moon and worthlessly orbiting the Earth. This is in part because we make CPUs in fabs not by just tasking piles of CPUs to make babies. But it's also because nobody wants to invest 20% of compute power today in providing a worthless excess of compute power in another 20 years, building fab after fab after fab for no reason else.

So no — I’m not claiming “nothing costs anything.”
I’m showing you that once a system crosses a critical efficiency threshold, it self-accelerates.
And you can either keep pretending that somehow physics, economics, and math will all freeze just to spare your worldview,
or you can wake up and realize:
This isn’t about what anyone “wants” — it’s about what’s happening.

The system you keep trying to describe as inevitable isn't self-assembling. 20 million solar cells don't copulate to create the eggs that grow into 20 million new factories to assemble solar cells. Somebody has to pay out a lot of money to build that. Nobody will do so if the solar market is oversupplied.

Alright, let’s just cut through the noise.

You're still acting like someone — some single entity, some CEO, some banker, some shadowy global planner — needs to sit down today, drop a few hundred trillion dollars in cash, and build the entire future all at once for what I’m describing to unfold. That’s not just wrong; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how scaling and economic momentum actually work in the real world.

I never said solar panels self-replicate by themselves like rabbits or CPUs making babies. Of course solar panels require materials. Of course they require factories and robotic assembly lines and logistics.
The point you’re refusing to engage with is that all those processes themselves get automated, powered by the very energy they're helping generate — at lower and lower marginal cost — without needing some trillion-dollar committee to do it all in one coordinated move.

You think materials acquisition stops exponential growth?
Let’s walk through it:

In the near future, robots will mine the necessary metals.
Robots will refine the ore.
Robots will fabricate parts, assemble modules, ship them to installation sites, install them, maintain them, repair them, and decommission them 30 years later.
All powered by solar, wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric — clean sources that, once installed, no longer need human labor to operate.

The cost curves for every single one of those steps are already trending down.
The reliance on manual labor is already decreasing.
And once you sever labor from production and sever energy scarcity from production, the entire economic structure mutates whether you like it or not.

You keep insisting "nobody will build all that if the market's oversupplied."
And I keep telling you: the oversupply is exactly the mechanism that wipes out scarcity — and along with it, the capitalist cost structure you're trying to defend as eternal.

Now here's where you should really be paying attention:

You're imagining the economy as it is today — driven by scarcity, by prices, by labor competing for wages.
But as automation devours more and more of the labor market — first 50%, then 80%, then close to 100% — your beloved "buying power" collapses. Jobs vanish. Incomes dry up.
Then what?

At that point, it doesn’t matter if corporations “want” oversupply or not.
Without human consumers who can afford goods, the system has to either adapt (by making necessities free or near-free) or implode under its own contradictions.

That's the crux.

You can sit here quibbling about whether we need trillions upfront or not, but the simple truth is:

The machines are coming.
The jobs are leaving.
The energy is getting cheaper.
And the old economic logic is dying.

You can yell at the river all you want. It's still going to flow.

Maybe take a second and ask yourself:
What’s your solution for mass unemployment when 80–100% of jobs vanish?

Because mocking the future isn’t a plan.
And stubborn denial won’t keep food on your table when the old system breaks.

[seeds]

Alright, Seeds—
you’re spinning in circles now, and it's getting embarrassing.

You keep asking, like it's some kind of mic drop, "How can ruthless capitalists make profits if nobody can buy anything?"
That's the point, genius. They can't.

Finally,...now ^^^that's^^^ getting closer to the kind of reply that makes you sound a little more human and a little less like ChatGPT.

Which is exactly why I keep saying: if we don’t radically rethink the structure of society—ownership, distribution, purpose—the whole damn system crashes.
The corporations won't save it. The billionaires won't save it.
They'll ride it down into the abyss trying to squeeze a few last dollars out before everything breaks.

Yet you went out on a limb and made the, again, prediction ("concrete claim") that within a mere 33 years from now, at least 80% of all human labor in the most developed countries will be gone because AI and robots will have replaced the human workforce.

So, unless you are actually naive enough to presume that between now, and 33 years from now, we will have managed to...

"...radically rethink the structure of society—ownership, distribution, and purpose,..." of the system...

...then don't you think you should have concluded that "concrete claim" with...

"...and in the late 2050s, the first two daunting tasks that the job-replacing robots will have to perform with their synthetic appendages are...

1. Retrieving and disposing of all of the millions of bodies of the humans who either died as a result of starvation because they had no money to buy food,...or died in the inevitable riots that ensued due to the collapse of civilization.

...and...

2. Physically defending the creators and owners of the robots from the desperate and angry mobs of humans coming to kill them for causing this problem in the first place in the hope of acquiring higher profits so that they could buy bigger yachts and bigger mansions.

..."

The point is that if you would have included that in your prediction, then the prediction would have made more sense.

As for the rest of your post—trying to compare robots replacing physical labor to slavery, throwing around "racist old time slave master" insults, making up "synthoid vs. meatoid" civil rights marches...
Good God, man, you sound completely unhinged.

Machines aren't people.
Robots aren't moral agents.
They don't feel. They don't suffer.
They don't have rights.
They’re tools, like shovels and steam engines—only vastly more powerful.

Trying to paint me as some kind of robotic apartheid enforcer is just desperate.
You're losing the argument, so you're flailing around with cheap outrage.

You're not very good at recognizing sarcasm, satire, and irony, are you?

Otherwise, you would realize that this...

Robots aren't moral agents.
They’re tools, like shovels and steam engines—only vastly more powerful.

...pretty much sums-up Hardcore Determinism's definition of a human.

I mean, taking into account all of your innumerable prior posts that have promoted Determinism and how humans are nothing more than material "brains and bodies" that are proceeding along some sort of "cause and effect" trajectory,

...then where, exactly, is a moral "agent" located in the makeup of a human?

And about determinism and "eternal oblivion"—
Yeah, I know.
The universe doesn't owe you a happy ending.
It doesn’t owe anyone one.
Grow up.

Well, if "growing up" means adopting your,...

"...life is meaningless and holds no ultimate purpose for us as individuals..."

...form of dark and hopeless nihilism implicit in the philosophy of "Hardcore Determinism," then no thanks.

That's your schtick, which, btw, does serve an essential purpose here on earth.

Indeed, for it helps to maintain humanity's "attenuated level of consciousness" that humans were purposely designed to function at in order to keep us from fully realizing that we are momentarily participating in, not a dream, but a "dream-like" illusion that we call a universe.

If you, yourself, were truly "grown up," you would have "awakened" to that fact.

However, like I said, you are performing an essential service for humanity. So, by all means, carry on.

The question was never about whether entropy wins in the end.
The question was: what do we do while we're still here?
Do we fight for something better—or do we sit around making snarky posts while the floor collapses under us?

You've already picked your side.
Keep sneering.
I'll be busy trying to build something.

First of all, you have no idea of what "my side" actually is.

And secondly, you seem to be mistaking "sneering" for the simple act of some of us holding up a mirror in the hope that you will see that if Hardcore Determinism is true and a human is nothing more than a,...

"...deterministic machine, operating under the same unyielding physical laws as a rock rolling downhill..."

...then your busying yourself by "...trying to build something..." is an exercise in futility.

And that's because, again, if Hardcore Determinism is true, then life is meaningless.
_______

[FlashDangerpants]

Alright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:

If you start with one solar panel today, and if that panel generates enough surplus energy to manufacture a new solar panel every 1.5 years — and then each new panel also starts doing the same — by the late 2050s, that one panel would have multiplied into about 6.7 million panels.

That's how exponential growth works.
It’s not trillions upfront, it’s compounding energy returns over time.
No master fund needs to dump a trillion dollars on day one.
The system amplifies itself because every unit added strengthens the base that adds even more units.

Excellent condescension, well done.

I don't know how to break this news to you.... solar panels aren't made out of electricity. They are made out of materials, materials which are acquired using a process we call "buying", often using this stuff called "money".

This isn't some utopian fantasy — it's the same growth curve you already saw with computing power, solar costs, battery technology, and even industrial agriculture over the last 50 years.

Even to the extent that those are true examples of exponential growth, I don't see how any of them undercuts continued investment in the way that your supposed solar power expansion does. Although if you don't understand the role of money in the whole thing I guess that would be lost on you. So think of it this way...

We don't take 50% of all the wheat we grow and replant in next season to gain exponential wheat growth until wheat loses all value. We don't have the land available, and we sort of don't really want wheat to be worthless. Also we don't want to cause a famine today in order to have worthless mountains of rotting wheat 20 years from now.

We don't pile 20% of Intel CPUs in a heap and tell them to make more CPUs for 20 years until dual core Xeon II CPUs are piled up to the moon and worthlessly orbiting the Earth. This is in part because we make CPUs in fabs not by just tasking piles of CPUs to make babies. But it's also because nobody wants to invest 20% of compute power today in providing a worthless excess of compute power in another 20 years, building fab after fab after fab for no reason else.

So no — I’m not claiming “nothing costs anything.”
I’m showing you that once a system crosses a critical efficiency threshold, it self-accelerates.
And you can either keep pretending that somehow physics, economics, and math will all freeze just to spare your worldview,
or you can wake up and realize:
This isn’t about what anyone “wants” — it’s about what’s happening.

The system you keep trying to describe as inevitable isn't self-assembling. 20 million solar cells don't copulate to create the eggs that grow into 20 million new factories to assemble solar cells. Somebody has to pay out a lot of money to build that. Nobody will do so if the solar market is oversupplied.

Alright, let’s just cut through the noise.

You're still acting like someone — some single entity, some CEO, some banker, some shadowy global planner — needs to sit down today, drop a few hundred trillion dollars in cash, and build the entire future all at once for what I’m describing to unfold. That’s not just wrong; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how scaling and economic momentum actually work in the real world.

The infrastructure for what you describe - mines, factories and so on - typically gets funded by the bond markets, so not a CEO. Bonds usually pay out something called a coupon over a long period of time, and they are rated based on the credit status of the borrowing company, where there would indeed be a CEO, so good for you, you got a business word right. But it's the bond market that decides whether you get your trillions.

You keep making out like only electricity is invested here, I don't know why you are giving me grief about that, it's your clumsy analysis that is at fault here. Things you need to buy for all this include land and mineral rights and transport. If the growth in the solar cell market you need to make your dream come true over the next 20 years or so is so ravenous that it will by itself consume 20% of global electricity supply, then the growth in robots and mines will also be substantial therefore costly, no?

What percentage of global GDP do you expect to consume for this project? How do you think the bond market will react to you having issued enough debt to pay for a giant expansion of the solar industry (20% growth of the whole thing in 2028 say) and then you attempting to issue new debt to the same amount the following year? This isn't how things actually work. YOU WON'T GET THE MONEY - YOU WILL GET LAUGHED AT.

I never said solar panels self-replicate by themselves like rabbits or CPUs making babies.

Go back and look at what you actually wrote about exponential growth. Look at the collection of words I was responding to.

Of course solar panels require materials. Of course they require factories and robotic assembly lines and logistics.
The point you’re refusing to engage with is that all those processes themselves get automated, powered by the very energy they're helping generate — at lower and lower marginal cost — without needing some trillion-dollar committee to do it all in one coordinated move.

You're still fixating on the electricity right there.

You think materials acquisition stops exponential growth?
Let’s walk through it:

In the near future, robots will mine the necessary metals.
Robots will refine the ore.
Robots will fabricate parts, assemble modules, ship them to installation sites, install them, maintain them, repair them, and decommission them 30 years later.
All powered by solar, wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric — clean sources that, once installed, no longer need human labor to operate.

The mining will still be expensive. The robots are still expensive. And you need an enormous quantity of both.

For some reason, mostly retconned to make a timeline in a sci-fi story you are telling happen, you are engaged in a giant effort to spend all the money in the world to create factories to overproduce solar power, at which point the factories will all be useless because there's already too much power so no demand for their product. So the robots and mines both need to be overproduced as well, leaving excess mines and robots lying arounds as well. The whole thing is a massive adventure in pointless excess.

The cost curves for every single one of those steps are already trending down.
The reliance on manual labor is already decreasing.
And once you sever labor from production and sever energy scarcity from production, the entire economic structure mutates whether you like it or not.

Human effort has been replaced by machines 700 times over. The horse drawn plough replaced virtually all human power. Then it all got replaced again by the water wheel, and those wells with donkeys going round them. Then the steam hammer replaced all human manual effort. Although the wheelbarrow had already replaced it all thousands of years earlier. Eventually the train replaced all human effort. And then shortly thereafter the car replaced all human effort.

You keep insisting "nobody will build all that if the market's oversupplied."
And I keep telling you: the oversupply is exactly the mechanism that wipes out scarcity — and along with it, the capitalist cost structure you're trying to defend as eternal.

Great. Except circular and broken. The bond market won't pay for your factories to be built at such a rate that the bond market doesn't need paying back because you made money magically disappear. So you can't fix that by having the money disappear because the bond market made the factories that allow it to happen.

Now here's where you should really be paying attention:

You're imagining the economy as it is today — driven by scarcity, by prices, by labor competing for wages.
But as automation devours more and more of the labor market — first 50%, then 80%, then close to 100% — your beloved "buying power" collapses. Jobs vanish. Incomes dry up.
Then what?

Uhm, what? Surely the absence of scarcity brings costs down, that's the whole point of your money disappearing schtick isn't it? So buying power is up. It certainly needs to be, otherwise the economy collapses before the moment of transition. You see, you've forgotten about debt, if you don't have customers with buying power, then you don't have money to pay down your debts, and with the trillions you owe the bond market ... yikes.

At that point, it doesn’t matter if corporations “want” oversupply or not.
Without human consumers who can afford goods, the system has to either adapt (by making necessities free or near-free) or implode under its own contradictions.

The bubble would pop long before you got that far.

That's the crux.

You can sit here quibbling about whether we need trillions upfront or not, but the simple truth is:

The machines are coming.
The jobs are leaving.
The energy is getting cheaper.
And the old economic logic is dying.

You can yell at the river all you want. It's still going to flow.

Maybe take a second and ask yourself:
What’s your solution for mass unemployment when 80–100% of jobs vanish?

Because mocking the future isn’t a plan.
And stubborn denial won’t keep food on your table when the old system breaks.

Eventually, sure. But the timeline that you are trying to make it happen in just to make your story work is highly suspect.

[accelafine]

''What’s your solution for mass unemployment when 80–100% of jobs vanish?''

Just invent new jobs. People are doing that all the time. Most people don't do anything productive anyway. Look at all the pointless jobs with fancy-sounding but meaningless titles. They are endless. No one knows what these people DO all day. Then there are the 'life coaches', psychotherapists, HR, DEI consultants......

Or, everyone could just be hairdressers. I don't think AI will ever be able to do 'that'.

[BigMike]

Excellent condescension, well done.

I don't know how to break this news to you.... solar panels aren't made out of electricity. They are made out of materials, materials which are acquired using a process we call "buying", often using this stuff called "money".


Even to the extent that those are true examples of exponential growth, I don't see how any of them undercuts continued investment in the way that your supposed solar power expansion does. Although if you don't understand the role of money in the whole thing I guess that would be lost on you. So think of it this way...

We don't take 50% of all the wheat we grow and replant in next season to gain exponential wheat growth until wheat loses all value. We don't have the land available, and we sort of don't really want wheat to be worthless. Also we don't want to cause a famine today in order to have worthless mountains of rotting wheat 20 years from now.

We don't pile 20% of Intel CPUs in a heap and tell them to make more CPUs for 20 years until dual core Xeon II CPUs are piled up to the moon and worthlessly orbiting the Earth. This is in part because we make CPUs in fabs not by just tasking piles of CPUs to make babies. But it's also because nobody wants to invest 20% of compute power today in providing a worthless excess of compute power in another 20 years, building fab after fab after fab for no reason else.




The system you keep trying to describe as inevitable isn't self-assembling. 20 million solar cells don't copulate to create the eggs that grow into 20 million new factories to assemble solar cells. Somebody has to pay out a lot of money to build that. Nobody will do so if the solar market is oversupplied.

Alright, let’s just cut through the noise.

You're still acting like someone — some single entity, some CEO, some banker, some shadowy global planner — needs to sit down today, drop a few hundred trillion dollars in cash, and build the entire future all at once for what I’m describing to unfold. That’s not just wrong; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how scaling and economic momentum actually work in the real world.

The infrastructure for what you describe - mines, factories and so on - typically gets funded by the bond markets, so not a CEO. Bonds usually pay out something called a coupon over a long period of time, and they are rated based on the credit status of the borrowing company, where there would indeed be a CEO, so good for you, you got a business word right. But it's the bond market that decides whether you get your trillions.

You keep making out like only electricity is invested here, I don't know why you are giving me grief about that, it's your clumsy analysis that is at fault here. Things you need to buy for all this include land and mineral rights and transport. If the growth in the solar cell market you need to make your dream come true over the next 20 years or so is so ravenous that it will by itself consume 20% of global electricity supply, then the growth in robots and mines will also be substantial therefore costly, no?

What percentage of global GDP do you expect to consume for this project? How do you think the bond market will react to you having issued enough debt to pay for a giant expansion of the solar industry (20% growth of the whole thing in 2028 say) and then you attempting to issue new debt to the same amount the following year? This isn't how things actually work. YOU WON'T GET THE MONEY - YOU WILL GET LAUGHED AT.

I never said solar panels self-replicate by themselves like rabbits or CPUs making babies.

Go back and look at what you actually wrote about exponential growth. Look at the collection of words I was responding to.

Of course solar panels require materials. Of course they require factories and robotic assembly lines and logistics.
The point you’re refusing to engage with is that all those processes themselves get automated, powered by the very energy they're helping generate — at lower and lower marginal cost — without needing some trillion-dollar committee to do it all in one coordinated move.

You're still fixating on the electricity right there.

You think materials acquisition stops exponential growth?
Let’s walk through it:

In the near future, robots will mine the necessary metals.
Robots will refine the ore.
Robots will fabricate parts, assemble modules, ship them to installation sites, install them, maintain them, repair them, and decommission them 30 years later.
All powered by solar, wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric — clean sources that, once installed, no longer need human labor to operate.

The mining will still be expensive. The robots are still expensive. And you need an enormous quantity of both.

For some reason, mostly retconned to make a timeline in a sci-fi story you are telling happen, you are engaged in a giant effort to spend all the money in the world to create factories to overproduce solar power, at which point the factories will all be useless because there's already too much power so no demand for their product. So the robots and mines both need to be overproduced as well, leaving excess mines and robots lying arounds as well. The whole thing is a massive adventure in pointless excess.

The cost curves for every single one of those steps are already trending down.
The reliance on manual labor is already decreasing.
And once you sever labor from production and sever energy scarcity from production, the entire economic structure mutates whether you like it or not.

Human effort has been replaced by machines 700 times over. The horse drawn plough replaced virtually all human power. Then it all got replaced again by the water wheel, and those wells with donkeys going round them. Then the steam hammer replaced all human manual effort. Although the wheelbarrow had already replaced it all thousands of years earlier. Eventually the train replaced all human effort. And then shortly thereafter the car replaced all human effort.

You keep insisting "nobody will build all that if the market's oversupplied."
And I keep telling you: the oversupply is exactly the mechanism that wipes out scarcity — and along with it, the capitalist cost structure you're trying to defend as eternal.

Great. Except circular and broken. The bond market won't pay for your factories to be built at such a rate that the bond market doesn't need paying back because you made money magically disappear. So you can't fix that by having the money disappear because the bond market made the factories that allow it to happen.

Now here's where you should really be paying attention:

You're imagining the economy as it is today — driven by scarcity, by prices, by labor competing for wages.
But as automation devours more and more of the labor market — first 50%, then 80%, then close to 100% — your beloved "buying power" collapses. Jobs vanish. Incomes dry up.
Then what?

Uhm, what? Surely the absence of scarcity brings costs down, that's the whole point of your money disappearing schtick isn't it? So buying power is up. It certainly needs to be, otherwise the economy collapses before the moment of transition. You see, you've forgotten about debt, if you don't have customers with buying power, then you don't have money to pay down your debts, and with the trillions you owe the bond market ... yikes.

At that point, it doesn’t matter if corporations “want” oversupply or not.
Without human consumers who can afford goods, the system has to either adapt (by making necessities free or near-free) or implode under its own contradictions.

The bubble would pop long before you got that far.

That's the crux.

You can sit here quibbling about whether we need trillions upfront or not, but the simple truth is:

The machines are coming.
The jobs are leaving.
The energy is getting cheaper.
And the old economic logic is dying.

You can yell at the river all you want. It's still going to flow.

Maybe take a second and ask yourself:
What’s your solution for mass unemployment when 80–100% of jobs vanish?

Because mocking the future isn’t a plan.
And stubborn denial won’t keep food on your table when the old system breaks.

Eventually, sure. But the timeline that you are trying to make it happen in just to make your story work is highly suspect.

I honestly can’t believe you're this stupid, so for the sake of my own sanity, I’m just going to assume you’re trying to pull my leg at this point.

Because if you actually think my point was that solar panels magically sprout out of thin air, or that physical materials aren’t needed, or that the real-world economy behaves like some cartoon version of a bond market spreadsheet you scribbled on a napkin... then there’s no way you’re arguing in good faith.

You’re clumsily building strawmen so you can knock them over like it’s amateur hour.

The fact remains: exponential growth doesn't require trillion-dollar committees writing billion-dollar checks every week. It happens because individual incentives — to lower costs, to improve margins, to outcompete rivals — drive technology adoption step-by-step until the whole system tips over.

Robots will mine the metals.
Robots will assemble the systems.
Energy from clean sources will power the whole chain.
And yes, it will slowly and unstoppably erode the cost structure that today props up the wage economy you’re so desperately clinging to.

You don't have to like it.
You don't even have to understand it.

But denying it — when it's already underway — just makes you look like a guy screaming at an avalanche because you don't like the physics behind it.

Now tell me, genius:
What's your solution for mass unemployment when this reality, whether you like it or not, steamrolls through your cozy 20th-century mental furniture?

Or are you just going to sit there, cracking jokes while the ground collapses underneath you?

[FlashDangerpants]

I honestly can’t believe you're this stupid, so for the sake of my own sanity, I’m just going to assume you’re trying to pull my leg at this point.

Because if you actually think my point was that solar panels magically sprout out of thin air, or that physical materials aren’t needed, or that the real-world economy behaves like some cartoon version of a bond market spreadsheet you scribbled on a napkin... then there’s no way you’re arguing in good faith.

You’re clumsily building strawmen so you can knock them over like it’s amateur hour.

I am going to have to treat you much the same. You kept explaining that solar power could grow exponentially just because it could use some of the extra power to generate new solar power. You ignored all other factors. That's down to you. If you want to get pissy about me pointing this out to you, that also is your failing not mine.

What happened to your formulaic opener along the lines of "yeehaw, let's get down to brass knobs because you've raised a real hum dinger of a point here"? Don't I get one when I've been naughty?

The fact remains: exponential growth doesn't require trillion-dollar committees writing billion-dollar checks every week. It happens because individual incentives — to lower costs, to improve margins, to outcompete rivals — drive technology adoption step-by-step until the whole system tips over.

It's no good you complaining at me about straw men and then doing me like that Mike. No good at all. Be better.

Robots will mine the metals.
Robots will assemble the systems.
Energy from clean sources will power the whole chain.
And yes, it will slowly and unstoppably erode the cost structure that today props up the wage economy you’re so desperately clinging to.

Now it's happening slowly huh?
So what is your new timeline, the 2050s are out.

You don't have to like it.
You don't even have to understand it.

But denying it — when it's already underway — just makes you look like a guy screaming at an avalanche because you don't like the physics behind it.

Says you. I don't agree. This is just one more Malthusian prediction to go on the pile.

Now tell me, genius:
What's your solution for mass unemployment when this reality, whether you like it or not, steamrolls through your cozy 20th-century mental furniture?

Or are you just going to sit there, cracking jokes while the ground collapses underneath you?

There won't be mass unemployment, it never works out that way. If you have accelafine on ignore, you should take a look at her post above. She missed the opportunity to mention the vajazzle, but she's correct, all the jobs just move to the services sector. You have no understanding of economics, none at all, and you are far too arrogant to learn. But here's a very brief overview...

All that needs to happen for there to be an economy is work. The work doesn't have to make stuff, it just has to take some sort of human effort that somebody else is willing to part with goods, services or money to access. So yes, you can quite easily have an economy of nothing but hairdressers, fashion consultants, vagina decorators and eyebrow doctors. As long as they pass money of some form around while they pierce, cut and shine each other it's just as good as an economy of welders, coal miners and chimney sweeps. Every industry that goes away through automation just frees up so many more people for whatever service industry jobs we feel like creating.

[BigMike]

I honestly can’t believe you're this stupid, so for the sake of my own sanity, I’m just going to assume you’re trying to pull my leg at this point.

Because if you actually think my point was that solar panels magically sprout out of thin air, or that physical materials aren’t needed, or that the real-world economy behaves like some cartoon version of a bond market spreadsheet you scribbled on a napkin... then there’s no way you’re arguing in good faith.

You’re clumsily building strawmen so you can knock them over like it’s amateur hour.

I am going to have to treat you much the same. You kept explaining that solar power could grow exponentially just because it could use some of the extra power to generate new solar power. You ignored all other factors. That's down to you. If you want to get pissy about me pointing this out to you, that also is your failing not mine.

What happened to your formulaic opener along the lines of "yeehaw, let's get down to brass knobs because you've raised a real hum dinger of a point here"? Don't I get one when I've been naughty?

The fact remains: exponential growth doesn't require trillion-dollar committees writing billion-dollar checks every week. It happens because individual incentives — to lower costs, to improve margins, to outcompete rivals — drive technology adoption step-by-step until the whole system tips over.

It's no good you complaining at me about straw men and then doing me like that Mike. No good at all. Be better.

Robots will mine the metals.
Robots will assemble the systems.
Energy from clean sources will power the whole chain.
And yes, it will slowly and unstoppably erode the cost structure that today props up the wage economy you’re so desperately clinging to.

Now it's happening slowly huh?
So what is your new timeline, the 2050s are out.

You don't have to like it.
You don't even have to understand it.

But denying it — when it's already underway — just makes you look like a guy screaming at an avalanche because you don't like the physics behind it.

Says you. I don't agree. This is just one more Malthusian prediction to go on the pile.

Now tell me, genius:
What's your solution for mass unemployment when this reality, whether you like it or not, steamrolls through your cozy 20th-century mental furniture?

Or are you just going to sit there, cracking jokes while the ground collapses underneath you?

There won't be mass unemployment, it never works out that way. If you have accelafine on ignore, you should take a look at her post above. She missed the opportunity to mention the vajazzle, but she's correct, all the jobs just move to the services sector. You have no understanding of economics, none at all, and you are far too arrogant to learn. But here's a very brief overview...

All that needs to happen for there to be an economy is work. The work doesn't have to make stuff, it just has to take some sort of human effort that somebody else is willing to part with goods, services or money to access. So yes, you can quite easily have an economy of nothing but hairdressers, fashion consultants, vagina decorators and eyebrow doctors. As long as they pass money of some form around while they pierce, cut and shine each other it's just as good as an economy of welders, coal miners and chimney sweeps. Every industry that goes away through automation just frees up so many more people for whatever service industry jobs we feel like creating.

Alright, let’s make this simple, because you’re starting to sound like someone proudly explaining to a 1950s assembly line worker that “Don’t worry, once we automate car manufacturing, you can always get a job polishing mustaches!”

First of all:
You say "it always works out that way" and "there won't be mass unemployment."
Really? Based on what? Some vague 20th-century assumption that every time a sector collapses, a magical new one appears exactly in time and at the same scale? That's not economics. That's religion disguised as optimism.

When 80–100% of goods and services can be produced without human labor, powered without resource scarcity, there’s no economic gravitational pull left to drag displaced workers into "new industries."
You don't need ten million eyebrow waxers and vajazzle technicians when basic needs are free or nearly free and consumer demand plateaus. That's not how demand curves work.

And you sneer about service jobs like it’s some endless safety net, but you seem to forget something fundamental:
Service economies depend on disposable income.
No jobs → no disposable income → no clients for your eyebrow clinics or vajazzle boutiques.
Without wages, who’s paying who to sparkle up whose pubic hair? Nobody.

And I love that you think throwing around the term "Malthusian" is some kind of trump card.
Malthus was wrong because he underestimated technological innovation relative to physical resource scarcity.
I’m saying the inverse:
We’re solving resource scarcity.
We’re running straight into labor obsolescence.
Different problem. Different collapse dynamic. And no amount of clever eyebrow threading is going to plug that hole.

Now you asked about timeline.
I stand by this:
By the late 2050s, 80% of traditional human jobs in highly developed countries are at serious risk of elimination.
Not because I want it. Not because some committee votes on it.
Because economic logic, technological momentum, and physics all converge.

So again:
What's your plan for when millions of people aren't needed for production, can’t find service-sector jobs because nobody has income left to spend, and the entire wage-based consumer economy flatlines?

"Hope somebody opens a vajazzle salon down the street" isn't an answer.
It’s a eulogy.

You can keep whistling past the graveyard if you want, but the shovel's already in motion.