Comment Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal? (Score 1) 732
...taking into account that maintaining them would be essentially free? (as no salaries have to be paid to produce food, shelter, etc...
Except someone has to pay for the robots (materials, construction, maintenance, etc...) that produce the food and shelter. And then that someone owns the robot. And are they going to lend me their robot to build my house? Probably not. So I'm going to need to make money to build my own robots. Well... maybe I'll just be a scientist. Oh wait, everyone else in society is now a scientist so no one wants to pay for me to be a scientist. So now I have no robots and no skills with which to build my house or grow my food. And there are millions of others like me!
Just because we have robots to do all the work, the world won't magically transform into utopia. Someone is going to control the robots. Unless we want the government owning all the robots and determining how much food and supplies we all get, we need some sort of decentralized economy. I'd love to hear ideas on how this would work if people didn't have jobs that other people were willing to pay for, but I am having a hard time imagining how this would be possible.