If All Jobs Are Automated, Who Pays for Products/Services?

Question

Seriously, is there any answer to that? Is it a situation where unless UBI is implemented, the entire economy crashes due to having no one able to pay for anything? Or is there some other way to make an economy function if no one has the money to afford anything and everything's been entirely automated?I'm just curious, and I'm interested if there are any blog posts, academic papers, etc explaining what would happen here.

bananarchist · Accepted Answer

If energy and food production (eg mining and farming) are automated, if transportation of such resources (eg shipping) is automated, and if resource distribution (eg grocery stores, utilities, and other mercantile outfits) are automated, and these systems' integration is automated, money, and thus the idea of "payment" go away.
The issues are the Monday before that, when one or two jobs are still necessary, when money hasn't yet entirely inflated into worthlessness, and the Monday after that, when people realize they have nothing to live for if they can't be of service to their community or loved ones, have no dreams to chase, and their only means for expression that hasn't been automated away is the destruction of their despair's origin: the systems that keep them alive begging nothing in return.
Check out the short story "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster

saddist0 · Answer

You don't need money in that hypothetical vision.
It is scale between cost of production and what everyone can pay for that service.
The producer of services no longer need money (automated) to create, hence the overall cost for everything can be zero. The only cost is RnD for future automations and I assume society as whole can collect that.