Artificial Intelligence, & Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism

In the future, machines will replace humans in jobs. This is not controversial: it's what machines have done since well before the start of the industrial revolution. Petrol pump attendants were replaced by automated pumps, secretaries were replaced by Microsoft Office. This is what economists call the substitutive effect of automation: humans are substituted in jobs by machines. From time to time, fears have been expressed that humans would run out of jobs entirely. I first wrote about this concern back in 1980, and like many other people at the time, I under-estimated the resilience of what economists call the complementary effect of automation.