It’s true - but then where do folks get money to buy from the businesses?

Eventually this merry-go-round runs into some issues if we don’t figure out a way to make this huge productivity boom work.

Folks stop having money to buy from businesses. Other businesses buy from them instead.

There's no hard and fast rule that humans need to be involved in the economy, it's just that until recently, you needed to pay them in order to have an economy that worked.

Corporations are legally people; give them enough brains, and they may become a real boy one day.

From other business owners. If this hypothesis is true, they're saying the share of wealth controlled by labour goes dramatically down, and the share of wealth controlled by capital goes dramatically up. So most of your revenue will come from capital holders instead of labourers.

In theory:

1) This would make stocks worth a lot more and produce more dividends so everyone owning stock would get money to spend.

2) Governments effectively indirectly own ~40% of all business profits via corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, sales taxes. So governments would also have more revenues to spend/redistribute (this depends on governments not wasting it, spending it on wars etc.)

All money is a merry-go-round when you get down to it.

That doesn't mean the wheels won't fall off, they fall off pretty regularly as is.

The difference between this loop and the previous loops, is that people making the tech used to be pretty straightforward ("invest in me, your money will let me make a machine that lets me fire 90% of my peasants and we can share in the savings"), while today they're all "invest in me, either this will kill everyone or just make the concept of money irrelevant, either way rotflmao".