I find this to be an impossible problem because everything that any consumer could possibly want already exists. In fact, there are too many things and wealthy people are literally going insane trying to absorb the enormous supply and range of goods and services that are available to them. Sales is basically a zero-sum game of one useless product or service stealing market share from another useless product or service.
The only real problem which exists in society is the problem that the system itself prevents us from solving. The problem of allowing people to obtain money to buy the damn stuff that is being produced and whose production could be easily scaled up at will and there is nothing save climate change and other doom narratives getting in the way of massively scaling up production and automating everything. Letting the pie grow as big as is required to satisfy everyone. Ask just about anyone on the street what they need and if they're honest, 99% of them will tell you that they need more money to buy the stuff that already exists. The government could essentially give free land and free money (UBI) to everyone, new cities would be built and the system would expand and decentralize outward, creating an abundance of opportunities.
How do you solve the problem of helping people to get more money when the entire monetary system is designed to concentrate wealth, to take away opportunities and wealth from the masses. The only solutions to the most important problem in society are political. There are no business solutions for this problem within the current political framework.
There is no incentive to actually automate anything (beyond the point when it satisfies only the elite) when the masses are systematically broke and desperate for money. People will always be as cheap as machines. Slavery exists on the periphery and will grow in the current system. It will come down to the cost of food for a slave or electricity for a machine... However, the slave can produce their own food in the same way that an intelligent machine could produce its own electricity. The net cost is 0 in both cases. Slavery is more achievable, even today.
Now if you're interested in ways to make money without solving the only problem that matters, then you need to basically come up with a solution to make the problem worse; which helps concentrate the money faster, more surveillance, more control, more plausible deniability, more dulling of the senses, more inequality, more suffering... Basically anything that helps to prevent political change. Nothing else pays in the current political framework besides protecting the current political framework.
Ok, but if you look into physical products. There were many successful car manufacturers since decades, still new companies like Tesla or Chinese ones enter the market... And seemingly there is money to buy these products.
I wouldn't say many because we can probably count them on our fingers. I personally don't feel so concerned about that sector though because it's a capital intensive industry. My take is that monopolies in such industries are not as harmful as monopolies in other industries which have naturally low capital barriers where the anti-competitive forces are felt far more strongly by more market participants.
When capital barriers are low and you are able to build a product which solves a problem 10x better than the competition within a specific niche, it comes as quite a shock when you cannot even find a single user willing to try your product for free. A product which is low capital to build can be very high capital to sell because you need an enormous marketing budget to even get one real user to try your product long enough to realize that it's 10x more efficient than what they're using now. Then there might be a ton of additional regulatory barriers standing in the way of a sale (esp. B2B). Massive chicken and egg problem. These kinds of situations where sale becomes a total bottleneck and stands in the way of delivering economic efficiency can make one feel that the economic pie must be shrinking fast.
Yeah, I feel this! There"s so much of everything -- the central challenge (of software anyway) is not actually creating something new, it"s standing out from all the noise and the thousands of others doing the exact same thing.
And increasingly all economic activity revolves around a handful of megacorps siphoning up all available money, with everyone else trying to insert themselves somehow into the siphoning process. Ideally "as a Service", ie by creating their own little siphon and attaching it onto their hos^H^H^Hcustomer.
Not just software businesses either, but because everyone has been conditioned into spending half their waking time staring at their little screens, traditional businesses too are expected to have an online presence and so carry their share.
Perhaps offering people education, is a way to allow them to access those jobs you describe, perhaps education in robotics? idk, I think this take is kinda gloomy.
It may sound like it but I didn't name a specific political solution. I believe that what we have now is a horrible form of crony corporate socialism-capitalism hybrid; it literally borrows the worst parts of all systems.
I think capitalism based on a hard-money system with a small government with 0% income and sales taxes would be better than what we have now. Private moneys and cryptocurrencies would be allowed and encouraged (not having income or sales tax would greatly aid adoption IMO as it would remove the need for accounting for tax purposes). Import tariffs would be the only acceptable taxes.
Given the current state of technology, I also think a communist or socialist system with some limited ownership rights (e.g. a family would be allowed to own the house they live in and a single small business) could work too. Corporations would be state-owned, passive shareholding would be outlawed.
I think either approach would be way better than what we have now.
The only real problem which exists in society is the problem that the system itself prevents us from solving. The problem of allowing people to obtain money to buy the damn stuff that is being produced and whose production could be easily scaled up at will and there is nothing save climate change and other doom narratives getting in the way of massively scaling up production and automating everything. Letting the pie grow as big as is required to satisfy everyone. Ask just about anyone on the street what they need and if they're honest, 99% of them will tell you that they need more money to buy the stuff that already exists. The government could essentially give free land and free money (UBI) to everyone, new cities would be built and the system would expand and decentralize outward, creating an abundance of opportunities.
How do you solve the problem of helping people to get more money when the entire monetary system is designed to concentrate wealth, to take away opportunities and wealth from the masses. The only solutions to the most important problem in society are political. There are no business solutions for this problem within the current political framework.
There is no incentive to actually automate anything (beyond the point when it satisfies only the elite) when the masses are systematically broke and desperate for money. People will always be as cheap as machines. Slavery exists on the periphery and will grow in the current system. It will come down to the cost of food for a slave or electricity for a machine... However, the slave can produce their own food in the same way that an intelligent machine could produce its own electricity. The net cost is 0 in both cases. Slavery is more achievable, even today.
Now if you're interested in ways to make money without solving the only problem that matters, then you need to basically come up with a solution to make the problem worse; which helps concentrate the money faster, more surveillance, more control, more plausible deniability, more dulling of the senses, more inequality, more suffering... Basically anything that helps to prevent political change. Nothing else pays in the current political framework besides protecting the current political framework.