Just some random thoughts: It seems to me that human needs can be roughly divided into three groups, based on what is needed to fulfill them:
material—physical things, such as house, food, clothes
informational—education, news
human attention—doctors, police
(This is not a clear division, because you also need people who repair broken houses, etc.)
The easiest category is the informational needs, because there the work can scale best. For example, if you produce a great textbook under a free license (that allows free distribution and translation), it’s just a matter of translating it, and delivering to everyone (cheap if electronically, more expensive on paper).
Material needs are somewhere in the middle. If you can define a sufficiently cheap functional standard, it’s just a question of finding money for its mass production. Problematic is housing, because it also requires land.
The hardest category is the one that requires qualified human work, such as doctors. In absence of a human-level AI, this scales worst. You need enough humans to do that, their time is limited, and not everyone can do that.
Very interesting division, thanks for your comment.
Paraphrasing what you said, in the informational domain we are very close to post scarcity already (minimal effort to distribute high level education and news globally), while in the material and human attention domain we likely still need advancements in robotics and AI to scale.
Just some random thoughts: It seems to me that human needs can be roughly divided into three groups, based on what is needed to fulfill them:
material—physical things, such as house, food, clothes
informational—education, news
human attention—doctors, police
(This is not a clear division, because you also need people who repair broken houses, etc.)
The easiest category is the informational needs, because there the work can scale best. For example, if you produce a great textbook under a free license (that allows free distribution and translation), it’s just a matter of translating it, and delivering to everyone (cheap if electronically, more expensive on paper).
Material needs are somewhere in the middle. If you can define a sufficiently cheap functional standard, it’s just a question of finding money for its mass production. Problematic is housing, because it also requires land.
The hardest category is the one that requires qualified human work, such as doctors. In absence of a human-level AI, this scales worst. You need enough humans to do that, their time is limited, and not everyone can do that.
Very interesting division, thanks for your comment.
Paraphrasing what you said, in the informational domain we are very close to post scarcity already (minimal effort to distribute high level education and news globally), while in the material and human attention domain we likely still need advancements in robotics and AI to scale.