...From a laborer who will not be a consumer. A laborer who will not only take jobs away from laborers who are consumers, but who will also make the marketability of remaining consume laborers diminished. All the while working to increase the overall ability to do more with less; more service per unit of cost, and more product per unit of cost, which basically boils down to more output all around, per unit of time, that will need purchasing.

Some of that, of course, will go right back into the entire matrix of production and marketing, but certainly not all of it. It is, after all, called a consumer economy for a reason.

If you think about that for any time at all you will eventually end up asking yourself: Why?

You have more and more price, and feature, competition, that inevitably allows for more and more things to be produced (services or hard copy output), and yet, to continue to be competitive you make the one factor that is supposed to be the target of that increasing production ever more incapable of consuming to the degree the increasing output demands.

Sure, you can continue to raise the bar on marketing as a seamlessly constant living environment so as to wring more out every consumer remaining, but how long can that go on. Especially when that fancified, constant immersion, leaves minds ever more disconnected from not only the practicalities of living, but from the emotional and spiritual needs of a species evolved to be both social, and questioning of what might be reached beyond our grasp.

There is also the notion that the invisible hand might do its thing... You know, too much is automatically supposed to force a cutback in production, but again, how far can that go when there's so much ability to produce in the first place; which is more than simply the physical infrastructure itself, as you have the increasing piles of counters, the ones and zeros of what now passes as currency, flowing vaster than any river, or ocean current, and absolutely needing to continue flowing. They translate here and there to make the infrastructure and if it then does not transfer back, amplified, so it can rinse and repeat, what is to become of it?

Isn't it possible, now that labor, tied to production, as a means to mediate the distribution of production (or what we used to call working for a living), via commercialized exchange, no longer makes any sense at all? How can it make sense when the factor providing the consumption has ever decreasing commercial value? Wouldn't that tend to suggest that using "commercial value" in the notion of labor in the first place, so that it can translate to "commercialized consumption," has been made to be unworkable? And should that surprise us at all when we look at the history of what technological change has done to once firmly held modes of human interaction?

I, for one, don't think so, and I am at a complete loss as to why so may, supposedly knowledgeable people, can still cling to the idea that it can continue on indefinitely. The one, "bottom line," reality that is quite clear here is this: Vastly new productive capability must inevitably demand an completely new relationship between how we produce and how we distribute. Which will have to mean a completely new approach to the creation, management, and maintenance of productive resource. You really don't need to be a systems analyst, or an economist to see this.