Hypothetical: When 1 Million people can provide for the whole world?

I guess they'll be slaves for the amusement of the oligarchy.

 

Same as it always was

 

Price's law.

Half the productivity comes from the square root of any given set of people.

 

Feral. Bands. Of mud people. A return. To form.

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On the real, seems like one strategy will be a universal basic income.
Another strategy will be "**** y'all, I got mine" from the producers.

Both outcomes look kind of depressing. Humans like to have purpose, and designing earrings to sell on ETSY will probably not be that satisfying to the majority of human beings.

 

One of those outcomes I'd describe with words more insidious than depressing, and the other isn't really depressing IMO.

You'd have to be of the assumption that most people today find purpose in their work, on top of believing that if relieved of responsibilities of the basics, we'd be left to only frivolous actions.

As an educator I can understand the (justified) purpose you get, but a Target cashier staring at the self-checkout aisle across from them all day, as you can imagine probably feels a good bit different. There's **** that matters and **** that doesn't.

I'd feel optimistic about people finding ways to enjoy and add to life... if there's truly some sort of well-functioning system that's properly allocating resources.

 

Purely theoretical situation: There are enough resources on the planet that everyone could be housed and fed.

At some point for right or wrong people invented money and economy and it's been that way ever since. But it is societal man-made creation.

 

I for one welcome our Robot Overlords!

Seriously though this is a problem that many science fiction writers have dealt with. The Golden Age of Sci-Fi would say that this frees up humanity from basic struggle and instead humans can devote themselves to other pursuits. This isn't dealt with in depth a lot in Star Trek but is stated several times that Earth is a paradise with no poverty or hunger as limitless energy and resources can maintain humanity. Instead humans have poured their energy into exploring and colonizing the Galaxy.

The other view of it is that humans become passive and lose self-will. This is actually shown very well in Wall-E where the humans are just lazy and fat concerned only about things like fashion and comfort while robots do all the work.

Asimov in his Robot series takes a different view. Human societies run by robots become a society sort of like Roman patricians. The human population plumets while the robot population vastly outnumbers humans. Humans don't become completely lazy but instead devote their very long lives to intellectual and artistic pursuits. Because humans are long lived and also have all their needs met they become increasingly antisocial. Even though they still pursue intellectual betterment they don't cooperate to build on their findings and eventually human society collapses and dies out.