LTV deprived Delong faces a future flooded with robots without the withering away of " the delicate machine " that is the market place

"To create wealth, you need ideas about how to shape matter and energy, additional energy itself to carry out the shaping, and instrumentalities to control the shaping as it is accomplished. The Industrial Revolution brought ideas and energy to the table, but human brains remained the only effective instrumentalities of control. As ideas and energy became cheap, the human brains that were their complements became valuable." "But" " as we move into a future of artificial intelligence that and into a future of biotechnology that grows itself as biological systems do, won’t human brains cease to be the only valuable instrumentalities of control?" "It is not necessarily the case that “unskilled” workers’ standards of living will fall in absolute terms: the same factors that make human brains less valuable may well be working equally effectively to reduce the costs of life’s necessities, conveniences, and luxuries." " But" " wealth is likely to flow to the owners of productive – or perhaps fashionable – ideas," " and to owners of things that can be imitated only with great difficulty and high cost even with dirt-cheap instrumentalities of control, dirt-cheap energy, and plentiful ideas." "The lesson is clear" "the marketplace is not guaranteed by nature to produce a long-run future characterized by a reasonable degree of wealth inequality and relative poverty." " Unless and until we recognize this fully" " we will remain at the mercy of Keynes’s poorly understood “delicate machine.”