Post scarcity

How will marketing look in a post scarcity society?
Assume we have so much materials and robots and basica income, that people can have everything they need without working.
But how will they learn about new products? Just word of mouth?

There will never be post scarcity because the rich will never allow it. They are not happy with what they have but what they can deprive others of having.

As long as there are non whites on the planet, there will never be post scarcity

One of two options with cornucopia technology:

1. Those who possess the capital to own such technology will keep it from the masses, creating artificial scarcity as says.
2. Redistributive policies will exist such that everyone is given a substantial basic income and the owners of the technology are unable to artificially limit supply.

It's all a matter of how the populace responds. It seems unlikely they'll be okay with increasing wealth disparity forever. Consider how close Bernie Sanders has gotten to the presidency as evidence of that.

But all that aside, we'll never truly be "post-scarcity" as entertainment and art will always be scarce, and we'll always be able to have marketable industries around those products.

We'll never know since there will never be a post-scarcity society.

Have a good life.

If our current procreation trends keep up, we will never have to think about post-scarcity society, because Islam mixed with a bunch of Tryrone's is not going to yield EM's (re:Robin Hanson) or an AI Singularity (re:Eliezer Yudkowsky).

>entertainment and art will always be scarce

Check all these Soundcloud songs with only 8 or 14 plays, check these YouTube videos with 40 views, these street artists no one looks at... Art is over-abundant. No one cares anymore, almost no one pays for it, and marketing is necessary because no one's going to want to listen to your songs otherwise.

If art were scarce, we wouldn't need to market it.

That's the intent. Scarcity is the only thing that makes the elite elite: in a post-scarcity society, the billionaire sociopaths would live at the same standard as the plebians, and that's just not acceptable. The masses need to suffer so the elite's wealth has meaning. Since western society is heading towards post-scarcity, the only thing to do is kill western society.

How is it that on a board entitled "Business and Finance" there exists people who fall for the Marxist meme that wealth is finite and the rich want you to suffer? I was beginning to doubt for a second that this board was /pol/ overspill but this settled it.

To put it bluntly, I see EM's or AI Singularity precursors to post-scarcity, but think it will not occur because we have become too dumb to get there. Slate Star Codex has a good review of a book on EM's and I'd recommend heading over there because I've had like 6 beers...otherwise I like to keep it to myself kek.

What does EM stand for?

I know what it means.

I think it stands for an EMulated mind or something. Robin Hanson this futurist dude has a book (The Age of Em) out about them and kind of owns the term...basically he thinks before a strong AI or AI singularity, we will have the technology to replicate molecule for molecule the human mind as EM's so they can be copied for specific tasks...i.e. you hire out 1K Elon Musk EM's to work on your task X.

It is all science fiction sounding, but who knows. Anyways, I don't think given our current path we will have the intelligence to sustain the march toward something like this (or strong AI -> AI singularity), and keep the lights on and planes flying....but just a dude on an anime image board.

You misunderstand. Art that people actually want is scarce and always will be.

user, there's a difference between not having a huge fucking boner for completely, unrestrained free market and thinking rich people are evil.
It is an undeniable fact that there is a trend of increasing wealth concentration among the wealthy. This is because our nation is becoming capital-intensive as opposed to labor intensive. Money makes money now more than it ever has. The more automated we get, and in the end-game of that as OP is alluding to, cornucopia technology, you can't fucking deny that the rich will be many magnitudes of power richer than they are now and the poor will be poorer. This is simply how that logically will work. It has nothing to do with evil or morals or whatever YOU insist on bringing into the argument. It definitely has nothing to do with thinking wealth is finite. In fact, the more tech, the faster our economy will grow. The total amount of wealth will continue to grow and be created, simply an ever-increasing share of it will go to those with the capital to invest, and not to those laborers who are becoming less necessary.

Now this is all predicated under a certain path, but OP asked a hypothetical involving that path, and I gave him the most reasonable and likely scenario under which such technology could exist, and it's a scenario with vast, and I mean many many many times more than current, wealth disparity. I don't give a fuck about political views. You clearly do.

>Art that people actually want is scarce and always will be

Nah. There's a ton of artists that are as good (or as bad) as the famous ones. But they're not marketed, so almost no one cares.

Marketing exists to make people care about "nice folk singer with a guitar #739,539" or "yet another black rapper who sings about the problems of ghetto life in his Lexus". There are a lot of them. They're all decent. But a label can only market a dozen of them.

Lol, I really don't know what your point is. The marketing creates demand. No, it's not scarcity in the traditional sense, but there will never not be an entertainment industry, and by definition a market requires scarcity.

You don't seem to notice how our economy is how it is specifically because those super-rich people are lobbying the government to push regulations that prevent those poor people from becoming less poor. In a free market, there would be nothing stopping you from hiring a dozen niglets for cheaper than the maintenance cost of the McSevingDroid. Instead the ones with the connections to manage a multinational corporation take advantage of overseas labor and fund grassroots campaigns for a higher minimum wage that would kill more job opportunities than the child labor laws already do. But you still seem to be under the impression that you can make a personal fortune by 'simply manipulating money' so I can't expect you to fathom the existence of the small business let alone the government's involvement in its demise.

>Muh benevolent capitalism! There are no shortcomings! Just the ebil gubbermint!
Do you get your view of economics from fucking Atlas Shrugged? Because if so, you probably feel right at home here on Veeky Forums.

>you still seem to be under the impression that you can make a personal fortune by 'simply manipulating money'
>Strawmanning
Wew lad. Unless you honestly believe it's just as easy for someone with 5 bucks to work his way to billionaire status as it is for someone with 10 million, you know how silly your argument is and know full well that capital is more productive than labor at creating wealth. The more robots, the more true that statement becomes.

>Unless you honestly believe it's just as easy for someone with 5 bucks to work his way to billionaire status as it is for someone with 10 million
And you talk about strawmanning. Considering the same people who make those kinds of arguments start off with $50,000 and end up $80,000 in the hole, I'd expect it.
Let me ask you one question:
If nobody has a job (because the machines took them away), who could possibly buy your product?

The machines wouldn't remove the number of jobs, they would lower the (real) average wage, and as goods become cheaper, the relative standard of living will not change. The lower and middle class will stagnate, much as it has been doing since the 70s. The wealthy will absorb all of the added wealth.

See, you seem to be thinking that I believe rent-seeking behavior is bad. I don't. I simply know that, given the choice, all rational companies would pursue it.

Also, I'd like to add that from the way you're posting, you seem to think that any of this conversation is suspected to take place anytime soon. It's not. I wouldn't expect cornucopia tech for hundreds of years. Applying modern-day politics to that is retarded.

>people with money are the reason I'm not a winner

Kill self etc.

Lol, sure. If you're illiterate, it's totally your god-given right to let everyone else know on the internet. Bravo, user.

>You misunderstand. Art that people actually want is scarce and always will be.
The is literally the opposite of physical reality. Are you stupid? I have to stop coming to this board.

Unless you're going to argue that in the future the music industry, the art industry, the movie industry, etc, will cease to be marketable, I honestly don't know what you're trying to say. Artists can't be at all places at once, and they can't sing all songs at once, that in itself is scarcity. It's not my fault if you can't think of scarcity in any way other than your myopic view.

Jesus Christ. This thread was supposed to just be a fun hypothetical about the distant future. What is wrong with you people?

You think basic politics will change any in the hundred years or so for cornucopia tech to appear? Besides, given that it's possible to make something out of nothing, this tech would have to use some form of raw material, and that would create a large mining industry, which doesn't really imply basic income and all that mumbo jumbo. If I can hire a dozen niglets to extract slowdivium from a space rock for cheaper than a McMiningBot, who would stop me?

>raw material, and that would create a large mining industry
If we theoretically had the technology to reorganize atoms, we could make literally anything out of anything else. Put one thing in, get the desired thing out. If I had to guess, we'd probably just use sea water.

As for "basic politics", I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Politics are RADICALLY different today than they were a hundred years ago. 80 years ago, socialism was on the rise, unions were becoming as politically powerful as industry, etc. I'm just speculating, but the idea that such a situation could reemerge isn't hard to imagine. And hell, whether it's just principally due to natural economic factors as I argue or through government intervention as you argue, chances are in the next couple hundred years, companies will return to robber baron-esque times, and the political environment that results from the backlash could position us differently.

There is only so much sea on the planet Earth. The reason why that would be a bad idea is the same reason why the eco fags want us to stop using oil. Or one of them. I remember something about 'global warming'. Point being, there are only so many resources on this planet, and the rise of atom reorganizers is going to create a space mining industry, and a new industry creates new jobs. Rocket ships to be assembled and staffed, launch sites to be managed, mining equipment to be handled, and any business person to let robots do all those would have to be out of his mind, unless some entity left them with no profitable alternative.

Of course it does, but those jobs created are less than the jobs they destroy. This is how things have been. The number of jobs may not have declined since the height of the industrial revolution, but with more automation, the number of hours worked definitely has. Hell, white collar workers tend to do 10 hours or less of actual "work" in a week thanks to all of the technology. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe people will continue to be paid more for doing less, but I just personally can't imagine that will be a trend that will happen indefinitely. And at any rate, that's just the upper echelons, not the other ones where things like hard labor jobs have transferred into lower paying service labor jobs. There will always be jobs. I said this in my first post, but the overall wages and work hours cannot stay constant. I simply don't see corporations taking policies that are better for the economy but not for their individual profits in the short-term, namely artificially paying people more and extending hours, without the government, by popular demand, changing it.

Well I assume the pay won't go up, but since the manufacturing costs will go down thanks to the handy replicator, the goods makers can afford to sell the products at a price that their miners can afford, you know like Henry the assembly line guy. All of this assuming that the Galactic Federation doesn't do something stupid like set a minimum wage or subsidize student loans for the Replicator Technician Academy.

Starfleet Academy. If you just wanted to be a technician for domestic replicators you'd go to a trade school. That'd be a smart investment over taking a course on Away Team Badassery.