Post scarcity

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.