Will money become obsolete in 10 years (with robots and AI)?

 

SPOTM Analysis of the Claim

[“Money won’t matter in 2036. If robots and AI provide more goods and services than a human could possibly consume, what do you need money for?”]

SPOTM rejects this claim. It confuses a possible increase in some forms of abundance with the disappearance of scarcity, property, calculation, and exchange.

1. The Claim Rests on a False Picture of Scarcity

Even if robots and AI produce enormous quantities of many goods, scarcity does not vanish.

Still scarce:

• Time
• Attention
• Energy
• Land and prime locations
• Unique or positional goods
• Rare materials and high-quality compute
• Skilled human judgment, trust, and relationship
• New inventions not yet automated
• Safety, order, and reliable institutions

“More than a human could possibly consume” is not true of life as a whole. A person can consume only so many calories, but they cannot occupy every desirable house, command unlimited energy, or have every possible experience at once. Abundance in some consumer goods does not abolish the need to choose among alternatives.

2. Money Is Not Only a Rationing Coupon

Money is a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Its deepest economic function is calculation.

Prices expressed in money allow people to compare costs and values across countless goods and plans. Without that common measure, a complex economy cannot rationally allocate capital, labor, energy, or time. This remains true even if many finished goods become very cheap.

If robots produce “too much,” the questions become:

• Which goods should they produce next?
• Where should energy and materials go?
• Who controls the robots and the land they occupy?
• How are maintenance, upgrades, and new inventions directed?

Those are calculation problems. Money (or some equivalent price system) is how a free society solves them.

3. Property Does Not Disappear When Goods Become Cheap

Someone must own the robots, the factories, the power plants, the data, the land, and the software. Ownership implies exclusion, exchange, inheritance, and investment. Those relationships are mediated by money or by something that performs the same functions.

The slogan “what do you need money for?” usually slides into a deeper claim: that private property and markets can be replaced by administration or by “free access.” SPOTM rejects that. Administration still has to decide who gets what, which is politics by another name. Markets use prices and consent instead of officials.

4. The 2036 Timeline Is Not a Fact

Treating 2036 as the year money becomes obsolete is speculation presented as destiny. AI and robotics can raise productivity dramatically. They have not abolished scarcity, capital, or the need for coordination, and there is no demonstrated reason they will do so in ten years.

SPOTM’s standard is reality, not a projected utopia.

5. What Would Actually Change

If productivity exploded:

• Many goods would become far cheaper.
• Real wages and living standards could rise.
• The mix of work would change.
• New forms of value (attention, unique experiences, custom design, trust) would become relatively more important.

Money would still be useful. It might change form (new units, digital settlement, different assets used as money). It would not lose its function as the tool of economic calculation and voluntary exchange.

SPOTM Bottom Line

Money exists because human beings live in a world of alternatives and must coordinate production and exchange without omniscience. Robots and AI can multiply output. They do not give anyone infinite knowledge of the best use of every resource, and they do not erase the rights of the people who create and own those resources.

Abundance, if it comes, is a reason to protect property, prices, and freedom more carefully — not a reason to declare money obsolete and hand allocation to planners or slogans.

In addition:

Here is a deeper expansion.

1. The Hidden Leap in the Slogan

The claim has two parts that get fused:

1. AI and robots will produce a huge surplus of many goods.
2. Therefore money, prices, and private claims will become pointless.

SPOTM accepts that (1) is possible in some categories. It denies that (2) follows.

Abundance of output does not abolish:

• the need to choose among uses,
• the need to maintain and replace capital,
• the need to decide who controls the machines,
• the need to coordinate millions of separate plans.

Money is the tool that makes those decisions tractable in a free society. Removing money does not remove the decisions. It only changes who makes them and how they are made.

2. Why “More Than Anyone Could Consume” Is Misleading

A person can be saturated with calories, clothing, and basic gadgets and still face scarcity in:

• housing where they actually want to live
• reliable electricity and compute
• medical expertise and timely care
• safety and legal order
• time with particular people
• original work, art, and discovery
• land, water, bandwidth, and rare inputs
• the next generation of machines that do not yet exist

Post-scarcity rhetoric usually pictures a finished-goods warehouse overflowing with stuff. Real economic life is a continuous process of maintaining capital, directing energy, and choosing among competing futures. That process does not end when refrigerators and phones become cheap.

3. Capital Still Has to Be Allocated

Robots are not a free gift of nature. They are capital goods. They require:

• design
• materials
• energy
• maintenance
• replacement
• upgrades
• coordination with other capital

If those robots are “providing everything,” someone must still decide whether the next increment of resources goes into more robots, more housing, more medicine, more defense, more research, or more leisure infrastructure. That is an economic calculation problem. In SPOTM/Reisman terms, money prices and profit-and-loss remain the only known method of performing that calculation across a complex economy without central command.

4. Historical Pattern

Every era of major productivity growth produces a version of this claim:

• steam and factories would end want
• electricity would make goods too cheap to meter
• automation in the 1950s–1960s would eliminate the need for markets
• the internet would make information and many services “free,” therefore money would fade

In each case, output rose and many goods became cheaper. Money did not disappear. New scarce goods appeared, capital became more important, and prices remained the coordination system. The pattern is not “abundance arrives, money dies.” The pattern is “abundance changes what is scarce.”

5. The Political Use of the Claim

“What do you need money for?” is rarely a technical forecast. It is often a setup for one of these conclusions:

• property in the means of production should be socialized
• incomes can be detached from production
• planners or platforms can allocate “free” output
• inequality will no longer have a function

SPOTM treats that move as a category error. If machines produce immense wealth, the moral and practical question becomes who owns the machines and under what rules they are used. Declaring money obsolete is a way of skipping that question and transferring control from owners and traders to administrators.

6. What a High-Abundance Future Would Actually Look Like

If AI and robotics become extremely productive, SPOTM expects:

• many consumer goods to become far cheaper
• living standards to rise for people who remain free to trade and accumulate capital
• work to shift toward higher-judgment, higher-trust, and higher-creativity tasks
• money to remain, possibly in new technical forms
• property rights to become more important, because the capital stock will be more powerful

The successful path is not “money vanishes.” It is “prices continue to ration the remaining scarcities and to guide the next round of production.”

7. SPOTM Formulation

Money matters because reality is a field of alternatives, not a single overflowing bin of finished goods.
Robots can multiply goods. They cannot abolish choice, ownership, or the need to know what is worth producing next.

A society that keeps property, prices, and voluntary exchange can turn machine abundance into widely shared prosperity. A society that treats abundance as a reason to discard money is likely to replace markets with political allocation — and then discover that scarcity never left.