You're assuming there's not a more economically efficient use for farmland than feeding really, really, really poor people. The floor for the price will be the opportunity cost of using the land to grow food rather than, say, covering it with solar panels and exporting computation or whatever else can be dreamed up. At some point, it costs more to feed people than their economic worth over their lifetimes. I think in the long term, computers and robotics will be ridiculously efficient replacements for labour.
If the "really, really, really poor people" are a minority, I can believe that, but then again that's already the case.
But if those poor people are most of the current salaried people, which is the threat of automation, who will buy that computation or whatever else? Do you think EC2 would be successful if all services running on it where only used by the very rich?
When you only have a small number of buyers, there's only so much computation or whatever that is economically feasible to produce.
To make an analogy to the current world, the profit margin of luxury cars is much higher than of small compact cars. If markets worked like you're saying, every car manufacturer would exclusively switch to making luxury cars.
You're starting to sway me. But suppose we cloned the least-productive 0.001 percent of the population such that they outnumbered us all one hundred to one. Suppose, too, that all resources on earth were multiplied by the same amount. Do you think that would end well for the clones? Would Honda start making cheaper cars for the clones? What forces are at work that would guarantee the survival of these unproductive clones?
To keep the analogy fair, resources (like arable land) would also need to be cloned 100:1 - after all, automation doesn't affect the people:resources ratio. I think they would survive, yes.
What forces? Greed from everyone who could see an opportunity to profit by selling stuff to an untapped market.
Yes. I just noticed that - an idiotic oversight. I added that in. I think in general I'm more wrong than I thought I was. But at some point it breaks. If all the clones have an IQ of, say, 50 there's no way they would be able to survive. To take it to an absurd extreme, suppose we cloned chimps instead of people. The vast majority of the new 100x resources would end up in human hands.
That is, it seems obvious to me that humans would find a use for that land that is more efficient than selling its outputs to the chimps, whose value would be absurdly low - 100 chimps being worth less than one human. I think it's more likely the humans would up their land use by 100 (even supposing a static population) than attempt to sell food for nearly worthless chimp labour.
Define "end up". Humans could own the majority, but they couldn't possibly consume the majority, and in the end it's still more profitable to sell those resources to chimps as long as you get any benefit from it, as opposed to just letting it rot.
Of course, that means chimps would be forced to work for humans to eat, but then again, is that new?
Your hypothetical situation is not very hypothetical. We already let food rot to get the benefits from letting it rot. Accounting for the whole production process we throw away 1.3 billion tons per year.[0]
In Before the wall came down I see a supermarket in East Germany where products in the process of expiring got new price tags 2 or 3 times. But in the west for as far as I know we just put the vegetables and the fruits on display, people can pay what it says on the label, and the rest is all thrown away, every day, all of it. If food doesn't fit the high standards set in that scheme is it thrown away even before it goes there. Then, much of the food that does get sold expires before it is eaten.
To simplify: The supermarket has to guess if you are going to buy the strawberries. If you chose beans in stead the strawberries go in the bin. The supermarket will try sell you the strawberries a few more times but eventually they will just remove them from the assortment and a scale down of the strawberry production will follow.
Yes, I know. But the hypothetical situation is one where the majority of people in the world starve. That's certainly not what happens today.
By the way, here in Portugal supermarkets do discount some perishables when their expiration date is near. And they're not thrown away every day, at least for most vegetables and fruit.
I don't think there's anything chimps could do that would cause humans to provide for more than a tiny fraction of them; farmland that produced bananas for chimps last year might be converted to biofuel or parkland or just lie fallow this year.
Ultimately the problem will be that for the vast, vast majority of tasks, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to spawn a new process to take care of it than to ask a human to do it.
I don't really expect everyone to starve to death - and to be honest I think there are more-worrying implications of AI than this: http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drive...
I do, however, want to point out that's there no economic law preventing the majority from being far worse off.