In a properly managed economy, the owners of the means of this new type of production would be forced to share the wealth it’s creating (if, indeed, it is creating wealth).
It’s not even complicated to think about. Imagine if one single company invented scalable, renewable, virtually free energy generation that had none of the downsides of existing technology (like variability, use of land, etc) and patented it so that no other company could use it. All of a sudden, millions of people working in fossil fuels, in renewables, in climate change mitigation, would be out of a job. But the same stuff - in fact more stuff is being produced, so this shouldn’t have any negative impact on humanity!
Suppose those people represent 1% of the total work that humanity is doing. What should ideally happen is that those people should be redistributed into the remaining 99% of work, but that everyone works 1% less. Obviously you can’t achieve that level of perfection in practice, but an approximation is fine. To prevent everyone getting 1% poorer, the profits of the now insanely wealthy company need to be redistributed somehow. Since this new method of power production will result in us being able to make more stuff more cheaply and more quickly, the people responsible for the invention will still be able to become fantastically wealthy while no-one else becomes poorer. Remember, money is just a medium of exchange; what it buys you is the goods and services people create with their labour. If more stuff is being produced, then it is possible for everyone to be better off.
In a properly managed economy, the owners of the means of this new type of production would be forced to share the wealth it’s creating (if, indeed, it is creating wealth).
It’s not even complicated to think about. Imagine if one single company invented scalable, renewable, virtually free energy generation that had none of the downsides of existing technology (like variability, use of land, etc) and patented it so that no other company could use it. All of a sudden, millions of people working in fossil fuels, in renewables, in climate change mitigation, would be out of a job. But the same stuff - in fact more stuff is being produced, so this shouldn’t have any negative impact on humanity!
Suppose those people represent 1% of the total work that humanity is doing. What should ideally happen is that those people should be redistributed into the remaining 99% of work, but that everyone works 1% less. Obviously you can’t achieve that level of perfection in practice, but an approximation is fine. To prevent everyone getting 1% poorer, the profits of the now insanely wealthy company need to be redistributed somehow. Since this new method of power production will result in us being able to make more stuff more cheaply and more quickly, the people responsible for the invention will still be able to become fantastically wealthy while no-one else becomes poorer. Remember, money is just a medium of exchange; what it buys you is the goods and services people create with their labour. If more stuff is being produced, then it is possible for everyone to be better off.