If AI and robots can produce lots of goods and services at low cost, it’ll be like the deflationary wave of globalisation. In a world of abundance, things are cheap. Or in other words, there’s lots of purchasing power to go around. How we distribute that purchasing power is another question. But there should be a lot more to distribute.
Some argue that despite automation there will still be lots of new types of jobs for people. Perhaps that will end up being the case if some jobs are just done better by humans, for example activities involving a social element. But eventually our technology will enable robots to emulate anything a human can do. At that point it will beg the question: is a programmed human any less human? And if not, is programming a human (or anything sufficiently complex) to be subservient ethical in the first place?
Purchasing power will ultimatly be distributed how we want it to be. Or perhaps rather based on how our system of distribution evolves, since it’s probably a complex sociological and economic system with various parties and incentives. Will we choose something like Universal Basic Income (UBI)? Or will it still depend on economic productivity? In that case capital owners will accrue the most wealth.
Another topic I think is often overlooked is not just considering the productivity of a bag of resources, but rather the organisational excellence/complexity/entropy of a system of resources. Maybe the ultimate resource will be institutions and organisation? In a world of chaos, it does seem that functioning institutions are indeed a scarce resource. How many countries would you say have functioning rule of law, commercial markets and infrastructure? In how many corporate environments is it easy to get things done?
The topic of how productive resources are organised as a system, in addition to just the quantity of productive resources, seems like a worthy topic for further investigation.