GDP is a very leaky measure for growth in this context. To see this, consider a utopian scenario with dirt cheap fusion energy powered Star Trek replicators. The marginal cost of most traded goods drops to near zero and GDP tanks (setting aside services). You have for traditional industry writ large a similar dynamic to that napster triggered for the music industry.
Assuming we don’t all die sometime soon and things ‘carry on’ the solution is likely to lie at least in part, eventually, in giving up on trying to summarise all of technology in a scalar value.
On another note, as a piece of futurism we see here that technology / the economy is predicted to either:
Get much bigger.
Get much smaller.
Stay about the same.
Do something else.
This covers just about every possibility, so it can’t constitute much evidence on which to update.
I feel fairly confident though that this argument doesn’t hinge too much on a particular technology such as IoT (as I see in the blurb). To unnecessarily recapitulate: something like the above argument on GDP falls out as the consequence of marginal costs being driven to zero. By whatever means, and relying only on micro 101 theory. In the limit, GDP will provide very little information about utility. There’ll be a lot of good, cool stuff in the world which will be free.
GDP is a very leaky measure for growth in this context. To see this, consider a utopian scenario with dirt cheap fusion energy powered Star Trek replicators. The marginal cost of most traded goods drops to near zero and GDP tanks (setting aside services). You have for traditional industry writ large a similar dynamic to that napster triggered for the music industry.
Assuming we don’t all die sometime soon and things ‘carry on’ the solution is likely to lie at least in part, eventually, in giving up on trying to summarise all of technology in a scalar value.
On another note, as a piece of futurism we see here that technology / the economy is predicted to either:
Get much bigger.
Get much smaller.
Stay about the same.
Do something else.
This covers just about every possibility, so it can’t constitute much evidence on which to update.
[edit: tidied up]
Jeremy Rifkin discusses this possibility in The Zero Marginal Cost Society
Might get hold of it and confirm my biases :D.
I feel fairly confident though that this argument doesn’t hinge too much on a particular technology such as IoT (as I see in the blurb). To unnecessarily recapitulate: something like the above argument on GDP falls out as the consequence of marginal costs being driven to zero. By whatever means, and relying only on micro 101 theory. In the limit, GDP will provide very little information about utility. There’ll be a lot of good, cool stuff in the world which will be free.