Midas PlagueFrederick Pohl
Midas Plague
by Frederick Pohl · first published 2011
7mentions
2recommended by
7HN commenters
2009–2025first – last mentioned
29% recommend71% neutral
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"[T]here may simply be not enough important things to do to keep everyone busy." More and more these past few years I think of a favorite old science fiction story by Frederik Pohl called "The Midas Plague." All production is done by robots. Production has become so, uh, productive that humans spend all their effort just wearing out everything made by the robots. "Poor" people must live in giant mansions…
on “A little secret that will make the world fall apart” ↗Highly relevant: Pohl's "The Midas Plague" <https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_19...>
on “The biggest crisis is the end of scarcity” ↗The downside of the utopia is the sheer amount of things that the robots can produce. Then what do you do with all that stuff?? That is a theme of the story "Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl. "The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced…
on “Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years” ↗…forgotten it. Here's a link for those interested: http://www.e-reading.co.uk/chapter.php/149381/8/Sheckley_-_C... It reminds me of "And Then There Were None": http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php And "The Midas Plague": http://www.e-reading.co.uk/bookreader.php/1010251/Pohl_-_The...
on “Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases” ↗There is a short scifi story from the 50s called the Midas Plague by Frederik Pohl which deals with this in a very silly way. It's available through archive.org https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_195...
on “Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes” ↗This Fred Pohl book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of…
on “If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?” ↗Tangential, but apropos your comment especially on "The higher you go the simpler you become...", "The Midas Plague" from 1954 by Frederik Pohl is a funny story about a socio-economic perspective shift -- related to a situation where "wealth" and social status in an age of robotic automation and automated factories…
on “You're enlightened – now what?” ↗