Marshall Brain on the economic effects of robots

One of the points I'm trying to make is that the cost of distribution of intellectual property goes down because you need vastly fewer people involved in distribution. Compare all the people employed by all the video rental stores and multiplexes and big box book stores and such with the people employed by Amazon. Behind the scenes robots have a lot to do with this. You can be sure that the Amazon warehouses are highly automated and you'd just as well call that robotisized. It's only going to be more so in the years to come.

Marshall Brain has done a lot of thinking about the economoic and cultural effects of this in the next decades and has written about it extensively. For pod enabled there's an interview where he lays out his proposals for dealing with it in a positive way. They're radical and I won't try to them here. Brain comes across as an optimistic and eminently practical guy. He's the one who started howstuffworks.com in his spare time, and that site is nothing if not straightforward.

mbrain future economics robot