Near Zero Marginal Costs
Description
CJ Dew:
"Capitalist logic dictates that the entrepreneurial spirit of a competitive market will continually drive productivity increases and marginal cost decreases. Marginal cost — the cost of producing additional units of product — is the focus, as this is where entrepreneurs and businesses make their profits in a market-exchange economy (at the margin); and when marginal cost approaches zero, so too does profit. The effects of near zero marginal cost can already be seen wreaking havoc across several media industries, such as entertainment, communications and publishing, as more and more content continues to be shared and made freely available across digital, collaborative networks.
The newest technologies of today are now poised to push marginal cost to near zero across every major sector. As renewable energy harvesting technologies become more accessible and efficient, individual homes and buildings will increasingly produce their own renewable energy and have the ability to share it freely across a distributed digital smart-grid. Alongside the Energy Internet, a decentralized Internet of Things will connect our smart-products and optimize efficiencies, both within the home and across the economy, in real-time. Education is becoming freely accessible through open online learning environments, such as MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses. Digital cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are enabling peer-to-peer finance options for a decentralized age, where instant transactions of any denomination to anywhere on the planet can be made with next to no transaction fee and without the involvement of a third-party (e.g., banks). Advanced robotics, data analysis, and artificial intelligence will increasingly take the place of humans across all sectors of the workforce. The automation of wage labor will lead to vast efficiency increases in the economy and ultimately liberate humanity from pecuniary tasks for the first time. 3D printing at scale promises to dramatically increase economic productivity and sustainability, using one-tenth of the material of traditional manufacturing, while eliminating the need for long-range shipping and logistics through the exchange of digital schematics over open networks. As these technologies continue their exponential rate of growth, an increasing number of products and services will be produced and exchanged across an unrestricted and free-flowing lateral Commons at near zero marginal cost." (https://medium.com/basic-income/post-capitalism-rise-of-the-collaborative-commons-62b0160a7048)