Who Buys Anything When Robots Do the Work?

After I posted why I doubt UBI is coming, one of the replies asked a good question. If robots do all the work and nobody earns a wage, who buys anything? Companies won’t keep making products nobody can afford, so doesn’t the whole economy just collapse?

I think people are taking that to the nth degree. This is my answer, and it’s a prediction. I could be wrong.

Yes, eventually. Slowly.

When the owners can’t keep making things and people can’t pay, the system does collapse. But there’s a long, slow death between the time people stop being able to pay and the state where no one can pay. A lot of shifts happen along that road, and these things don’t collapse overnight.

Most of what we do is seek out control over the chaos of the natural world. Extra resources give you a measured piece of control, including over other humans, and they keep you safe. It’s an instinctual response, and it would take a cataclysmic shift, fighting your baser instincts, to give it up. I’m not saying cognitive reasoning can’t overcome self-interest. I think it’s too much to overcome, so we cling to the old system like a raft in the wreckage of what once was.

I think that’s how most civilizations have fallen. They cling to the vestiges of something they had and some ideal of it. Rome clung to the idea that it was all powerful and couldn’t be overcome, while it expanded too far, tried to control too much territory, and let its own arrogance get in the way.

Banks have already written about economies that run mostly on a few buyers. Citigroup’s 2005 memo “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances” described economies where growth is powered by, and largely consumed by, the wealthy few. I think that keeps going while fewer and fewer people can buy.

The company store

So what fills the gap while people can’t pay in money? I think it looks like the company store.

In the coal towns, the company owned the mine and the houses and the store. Workers were often paid in scrip, which could only be exchanged in company stores owned by the employers, who could put large markups on the goods. Most of it was coal-company scrip in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. When you needed it, you got credit. You could get food. It was provided for you, but not without a cost. Credit purchases obligated employees to stay with the company until the debt was cleared. The way I read it, the company kept getting its own money back.

That’s what the song “Sixteen Tons” is about. Merle Travis recorded it in 1946, and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 recording became a million seller. Its refrain about owing your soul to the company store is about that trap: pay that only spends at the company’s store, and debt that keeps you there.

Now put robots in the mine’s place. My picture is that you don’t buy things with dollars from a market. You deal with the company, and what you deal in is credit, IOUs, and goods. Even when there was only credit, it was still bartering in a sense. You’re saying, I promise to give you some item later for these items today. So I don’t think we go to a flat barter system. I think we get credit and IOUs and trades, all of it with basically one counterparty.

You lease a robot and pay with yourself

I can imagine a world where I have three robots that have been allocated to me. If I want to buy a house, I give up two of those robots back to the company in exchange for the house. We’ve traded one thing for the other.

I honestly don’t know how the robots get allocated. That part is a gray area, and I’m not going to pretend I have it worked out. It’s essentially UBI, but now we’re bartering in goods. I don’t think we’d be handed them directly. I could see it being illegal to make your own, with government policy saying you use the ones that are dispensed. Or you build them yourself and can only assemble up to a certain amount. Whether we all get an even share or it’s decided by some other measure, I don’t know.

What would your robots do? Maybe they help you build and manage a garden, or do things around the house, or help you build the house in the first place. Maybe they’re the gophers. Maybe they’re how you interact with all the other robots in the system and place orders for means of production from the people who have the army of robots.

And maybe they’re leased from the company in exchange for something. Uploading your experiences. Letting the company use your data in interesting ways. Scanning the knowledge in your brain and feeding more experiences into the AI. Who knows what it would actually be?

That last one points at something the rest of us would still have to trade. Epoch AI projected in a 2022 paper, revised in 2024, that training datasets could grow to roughly the size of the available stock of public human text data somewhere between 2026 and 2032. If the models run out of what people have already written down, then new human experience is the thing a company would pay for.

Who controls the robot

The company store only works if you can’t go around it. That’s why I said it might be illegal to make your own robot. If you can only use the ones that are dispensed, whoever dispenses them owns the market.

We’ve already seen what a lock like that looks like. The FTC and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued John Deere in January 2025. The FTC said the only fully functional software repair tool for Deere equipment is made by Deere, and that Deere sold it only to its authorized dealers, which forced farmers to use the more expensive dealers for critical repairs.

That lock got broken. In July 2026 the FTC announced a settlement. For the next 10 years, under the supervision of the FTC and the plaintiff states, Deere has to give farmers and independent repair shops the same repair resources, including software, that it gives its dealers.

So a company was accused of locking owners out of their own equipment, and it took about a year and a half of litigation to get a settlement.

Bread and circuses for the have-nots

If you don’t have robots, I think you’re in dire straits. What do people do all day when work isn’t required from humans, and human work is subpar? That’s a million dollar question.

I think entertainment becomes the likeliest answer. Bread and circuses: here’s food and entertainment. The phrase comes from the Roman satirist Juvenal, around 100 CE, and refers to superficial appeasement. We already seek out instant gratification, jumping between dopamine hits, doom scrolling through every Instagram reel and TikTok. I think those people end up on a constant dopamine drip.

Then what’s the motivation for the owners to keep those people around if they aren’t needed to keep society running? People are trained to care most about those closest to them. We care about our own families, and we feel bad when somebody else’s family loses someone, but it’s not the same as grieving. It could also mean we get the motivation of altruism and start to develop the utopia out. I don’t know if that happens.

For the have-nots, I expect a hard time scrapping for the base level of existence, and that’s where the dystopia part comes from. And the want to hoard overrides with some people. Say you and I each have three robots, and I let my neighbor use mine for a week or two. Then somebody realizes they’d really like six, and kills their neighbor to get them. Or people figure out how to hack the robots so they have more under their control. I don’t think most humans are programmed to be happy with exactly what they have when they could have more.

What ends up scarce

I don’t think the things we’ve traditionally treated as scarce stay scarce. I think we can keep building robots more or less forever. If robots stay scarce, it’ll be because someone limits how many you’re allowed. I don’t know who does the limiting. Maybe a government, run by people or by AI, though I’m not sure government survives in its current form. Maybe the corporations that own the robots. Historically, whoever set the rules needed an army or a state to enforce them. Own enough robots and you have both: your own government, with autonomous machines that carry out whatever orders you give. What I think runs short is usable land: land without contamination from industry, land for growing food, choice land. Clean water. Clean air. Power, electricity first.

Power is the one with numbers behind it. The International Energy Agency’s report on energy and AI says data center electricity consumption is projected to more than double by 2030. And I think food rations, meaning how much each person is allocated, become a real measure too. There’s always a finite amount of production. We could build farms on another planet, but space is harsh, and that makes a source of production more fragile and easier to lose.

So I think the measure of wealth shifts to whatever is scarcest at the time.

Hoarding is instinct

We’ve hoarded wealth and other resources through the ages to exert power over other people, and I don’t see that changing. On the plains of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, you had to hoard as much food and water as you could to get through changes in climate and nomadic trips. Through those things you also acquired people, built a tribe, and stayed safe.

Hunter-gatherers tend toward an egalitarian ethos, but I think that sharing only went to the people you counted as your tribe. Outside it, we’re still victims of tribalism today. People will give their last $5 to their child or their parent, and think twice about giving it to a stranger.

Large scale hoarding took off with farming, because that’s when you could stock up literal tons of something. The anthropologist James Woodburn drew his line at storage: foragers who eat what they gather within a day or two tend to be egalitarian, and groups that store a surplus don’t. The second we were able to hoard larger sums of anything, we did, to protect ourselves from the possibility of famine.

The road runs through the company store

I’m not saying the utopia can’t happen. Everybody gets what they need, utilities are plentiful, nobody worries about work. That’s possible. I just don’t have a lot of faith that billionaires will suddenly give up their wealth, or that humans won’t find a new resource to hoard and control.

So my answer to who buys anything is that people go on buying for a long time, on credit from one seller, with their robots and their data. The point where nobody can pay is a long way down that road, and the first stop is a company store where I owe two robots for a house.

If you think I’m wrong, tell me in the thread on X. I’d like to be.