The upside to robots

ASI criticizes the Economist for its "breathless" fears of job losses from automation (ASI):

The Economist has another of those breathless pieces worrying about what's going to happen when the robots come for all our jobs. There's one basic error in the piece and one slightly more technical.

The basic error is that they fail to note that when the robots have taken all our jobs then we'll all be incredibly rich. One of the comparisons they make is to the first industrial revolution and that's appropriate. So, let us think about what happened when the mechanisation of cotton production killed off the hand weaving (and linen although more slowly) industries. Yes, certainly, some people lost their jobs: but the entire population now became rich enough to be able to wear cotton underwear simply because the production costs of cotton fell so far. And only those who have suffered through the woollen kind will know how rich that makes us all.

It's a very, very, basic observation: if the machines are making everything then everything becomes extraordinarily cheap. This is the same statement as the one that the machines taking all our jobs makes us all very rich indeed.