Robot Economy It’s often quite hard to imagine how humanoid robots might shift the future economy and a lot of people speculate on the pros and cons. But slavery is something that offers an historical proxy for studying the economic impact of a pulse in machine labor. We should be careful not to conflate robotics and slavery, because slavery is abhorrent for obvious reasons that simply do not apply to robotics. But robots as mechanical labor present a similar economic disruption as a sudden pulse of slave labor. Throughout history slavery creates the same economic patterns, and some of the effects spill over and fall broadly on all of society not just those directly involved in slavery. The effects are: • Historically free workers faced depressed incomes and loss of opportunity as slave labor undercuts costs. This always happens. Slavery has never really created new jobs for free workers. • Mature economies stutter and slip as slaves replace labor and deflate labor value, whilst also destroying demand. • Slave owners amassed wealth and capital gains even as economic activity often suffered flat or recessionary growth. The economy (GDP) often shrunk as wealth grew. • Facing impoverishment, free workers would often sell themselves into slavery. This perpetuates the sinking economy and slavery becomes a self propelling and all consuming system that eventually draws everyone into it. • Slave economies historically discouraged public investment, they disincentivise education, retraining, transport systems and public amenities. Much is written about the reasons the British Empire fought to end slavery, it’s often cast as a moral crusade. I guess in many ways it was. But we should remember that yes slavery was catastrophic for the slaves, but it was also ruinous for the free workers too. If slavery is left unchecked eventually everyone bifurcates into master and slave, historically there is no room for free workers to compete outside the slavery system. The very existence of slavery is a stalking threat to free workers. This sounds like terrible news for the future era of robotics. But that’s jumping to conclusions, there is a narrow path through this, a tightrope that crosses the hellish chasm. That tightrope is to democratise the ownership of humanoid robots and there are only really two ways to do this, and we are likely to see different countries do both. 1). All individuals must own a robot, if everyone owns a robot then everyone can benefit from rising capital gains whilst labor values fall. If you don’t own a robot once robots exist, you are in trouble. Laggard will likely suffer economically. 2). Public ownership of robots, if the government owns all the robots then free workers could be unburdened from tax, whilst also benefiting from the products of robot labor. It seems that any laissez faire free market capitalist system might converge toward a handful of fleet owners who amass wealth in a shrinking economy, as free workers suffer impoverishment and unable to sell themselves into robots they will ultimately face extinction. This is strange as I’m very much a free markets and capitalism person. So hopefully all of the above turns out to be wrong. Hopefully slavery is not a proxy for humanoid robot economics, and robots don’t result in the denudement of economic value of free people.