Post Scarcity

The definitions of Post Scarcity, like this one from wikipedia, are pretty good already:

Post-scarcity is a hypothetical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.

However I think that we can focus it a little more by looking at the details and by doing so get a better idea of the underlying factors at play. The first issue is the question of what kind of scarcity it's talking about. I think most people assume it's of "stuff" - things that people want. But in a very general sense we're surrounded by "stuff" already, far more than we could ever need or want. The raw materials that make up everything we use are abundant, as is the energy to convert them into any useful form. What's missing then is people to make the things we want from the stuff we have, what's scarce now is human labor. The definition alludes to the fact that "minimum human labor" will be needed, but I'd suggest that a true post-scarcity economy would require no human labor to function, and that would be the definition of it.

In a sense all human technology is trying to accomplish one of three things:

• Make human labor more efficient
• Take something that only a human or other animal could do and make it possible without a human
• Make the sources of energy generation easier to access

The first is pretty straightforward, it's things like stone tools at first, and hand tools now. It's any technology that takes something a person (or other animal) was already doing and makes it happen easier and/or faster. The last I would consider to be just nuclear fission and fusion, one which happens deep in the earth's crust and the other that happens in the sun. We can try to take those nuclear reactions and create an environment for them to happen where they're easily accessible. The 2nd, removing the need for a human or other animal, is I think by far the largest and most diverse kind of technology. Let's look at the major milestones that have happened in our past that would fall in to this category:

• Fire - at one point in early human history the only way to make use of the energy stored in plants was to eat them. The plants had stored solar energy in chemical bonds and we could oxidize the bonds in some of those plants by eating them. At one point this was the only way to create additional heat. Fire was an invention that meant a human or other animal wasn't needed to oxidize those chemical bonds to create heat. It was possible to do it without a human, so it could be scaled up and controlled, hot enough to cook food or eventually melt metals.
• Drawing and writing - there was a time when the only way to store information was with a person. What a person had seen was only available if you were there with them. Drawing and then writing allowed us to store information without a person.
• Steam engine and electricity - these both automated (ie. removed the need for a person) the transfer of energy. Instead of a person bringing fire where it was needed and being responsible for harnessing the power of that fire, steam engines and later electricity allowed that energy to be scaled and controlled  and transported without needing a person.
• Printing press - this automated the copying of information
• Telegraph, telephone, internet - All automated the transfer of information in increasingly efficiently and scalable ways
• Computer - this used to be literally the name of a job a person did, and when we invented a machine that did the same job it took that name.

There's also many other small inventions and improvements along the way, but I believe this trend of recognizing something that required a human to do, and then taking that one thing and making it possible without the person is the key trend in technology. Without a person involved it becomes much easier to scale up 'production' by making copies. Humans are amazing, but we get tired and need space and food, and we only get better at a task with practice and only by a limited amount. But for many things we're still the only way to get something done. We can invent tools that make us faster, or take away peripheral parts of the task so we can focus on what we're good at, but we're still a limited resource. A post scarcity society will be one where humans are no longer a limiting step in the creation of useful product or service. 

There's the expectation that post scarcity will mean that things will be cheap or free, and that seems like a realistic prediction to me. Not just because supply will be abundant, but because it seems like the main function of money is allow for transactions in labor. We usually think that money represents things, it makes easier than bartering to buy stuff, but I think that at the root of all value, anything that's worth spending money on, is human labor. As I said above the raw materials and energy to make anything are abundant, what's difficult is getting them and having the skills and experience to be able to make them into something. Also, there's the idea of property. If I buy a plot of land, it has some value, but no one had to make it, it was just there, so if money is used to represent labor, where did the labor come from? In theory I can "own" any land I'm on if I can keep other people off it and do with it what I want. What I really get when I buy land, is I get the deed to the land, and the deed represents other people's agreement to protect my land with/for me. It means that there exists police and courts and national defense and a city hall to track the records, and all of those things only have value because people are doing the work there. Some value also undoubtedly comes from what's nearby too, whether that's roads, utilities, or  restaurants and museums or a good school, all things that are created and maintained by people's labor.

If we do eventually hit a point where all those jobs can be done without people, where there's no scarcity of labor to make and improve things big and small, then there'll likely be no need for money either.