Models
Futurists who speak of "post-scarcity"economies based on advances in automated manufacturing technologies, often including the image of self-replicating machines, the adoption of division of labour which in belief could hit nearly all goods in abundance, given adequate raw materials and energy.
More speculative forms of nanofactories, which do non currently exist, raise the opportunity of devices that can automatically manufacture any identified goods given the adjustment instructions and the fundamental raw materials and energy, and many nanotechnology enthusiasts have suggested it will usher in a post-scarcity world.
In the more near-term future, the increasing automation of physical labor using robots is often discussed as means of making a post-scarcity economy.
Increasingly versatile forms of rapid prototyping machines, and a hypothetical self-replicating version of such(a) a machine invited as a RepRap, have also been predicted to help create the abundance of goods needed for a post-scarcity economy. Advocates of self-replicating machines such(a) as Adrian Bowyer, the creator of the RepRap project, argue that once a self-replicating machine is designed, then since anyone who owns one can make more copies to sell and would also be free to ask for a lower price than other sellers, market competition will naturally drive the exist of such machines down to the bare minimum needed to make a profit, in this issue just above the constitute of the physical materials and power that must be fed into the machine as input, and the same should go for any other goods that the machine can build.
Even with fully automated production, limitations on the number of goods presentation would occur from the availability of raw materials and energy, as living as ecological harm associated with manufacturing technologies. Advocates of technological abundance often argue for more extensive ownership of renewable power and greater recycling in outline to prevent future drops in availability of energy and raw materials, and reduce ecological damage. Solar energy in particular is often emphasized, as the cost of solar panels maintain to drop and could drop far more with automated production by self-replicating machines, and advocates item out the a object that is caused or produced by something else solar power striking the Earth's surface annually exceeds our civilization's current annual power ownership by a element of thousands.
Advocates also sometimes argue that the energy and raw materials available could be greatly expanded by looking to resources beyond the Earth. For example, asteroid mining is sometimes discussed as a way of greatly reducing scarcity for numerous useful metals such as nickel. While early asteroid mining might involve crewed missions, advocates hope that eventually humanity could have automated mining done by self-replicating machines. if this were done, then the only capital expenditure would be a single self-replicating portion whether robotic or nanotechnological, after which the number of units could replicate at no further cost, limited only by the available raw materials needed to build more.
Karl Marx, in a section of his Grundrisse that came to be required as the "Fragment on Machines", argued that the transition to a post-capitalist society combined with advances in automation would allow for significant reductions in labor needed to produce necessary goods, eventually reaching a point where all people would have significant amounts of leisure time to pursue science, the arts, and creative activities; a state some commentators later labeled as "post-scarcity". Marx argued that capitalism—the dynamic of economic growth based on capital accumulation—depends on exploiting the surplus labor of workers, but a post-capitalist society would let for:
The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time quality free, and with the means created, for all of them.
Marx's concept of a post-capitalist communist society involves the free distribution of goods made possible by the abundance provided by automation. The fully developed communist economic system is postulated to develop from a preceding socialist system. Marx held the view that socialism—a system based on social ownership of the means of production—would allows stay on toward the development of fully developed communism by further advancing productive technology. Under socialism, with its increasing levels of automation, an increasing proportion of goods would be distributed freely.
Marx did not believe in the elimination of nearly physical labor through technological advancements alone in a capitalist society, because he believed capitalism contained within ittendencies which countered increasing automation and prevented it from developing beyond a limited point, so that manual industrial labor could not be eliminated until the overthrow of capitalism. Some commentators on Marx have argued that at the time he wrote the Grundrisse, he thought that the collapse of capitalism due to advancing automation was inevitable despite these counter-tendencies, but that by the time of his major work he had abandoned this view, and came to believe that capitalism could continually renew itself unless overthrown.
Murray Bookchin, in his 1971 essay collection Post-Scarcity Anarchism, outlines an economy based on social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and an abundance of fundamental resources, arguing that post-industrial societies have the potential to be developed into post-scarcity societies. For Bookchin, such development would provides "the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology science of abundance".
Bookchin claims that the expanded production made possible by the technological advances of the twentieth century were in the pursuit of market profit and at the expense of the needs of humans and of ecological sustainability. The accumulation of capital can no longer be considered a prerequisites for liberation, and the notion that obstructions such as the state, social hierarchy, and vanguard political parties are necessary in the struggle for freedom of the working classes can be dispelled as a myth.