Hanson, Caplan, and Yglesias on the Economics of the Far(?) Future

I don't have time to comment too much now, but I think I disagree with all of them. Here's Caplan and Hanson. Here's Yglesias. What do you think?

I have trouble thinking of robots as labor rather than capital. I have trouble understanding why Yglesias thinks Marxian growth theory implies a Marxist polity, and therefore have trouble with his assertion that we'll move into socialism. I do think we'll drift towards a socialization of investment and a smart interventionism, simply because it's the intelligent thing to do. I also think the sort of subsistence dynamics they highlight is contingent on very real resource constraints and in a world where one of our most important products is innovation that repeals resource constraints, I have a hard time swallowing this "driven to subsistence" talk. We can certainly hit painful hiccups and speed-bumps, but if robots push us to subsistence we'll just spend a little less time constructing robots that are indistinguishable from humans and a little more time mining asteroids, terraforming planets, and developing renewable energy sources.