I'll throw out that two additional motivations that entities have to frame things as a race:
- Delay thoughtful regulation of the technology - if you can delay it long enough until the entity gets big enough to fund lobbying efforts, its much easier to reach steady state/too big to fail status
- Gain access to government funding - as a consultant, if there's no existential crisis of being forever stuck in second place (no one wants to be behind), its much harder to provide thought leadership seminars/get fully paid vacations (i.e. speaking events).
High GDP does not in itself result in high employment. It is simply a measure of wealth produced in the measured economy.
If I owned a fully-robotic factory that produced all the goods this country consumed, unemployment would be at 100%, but GDP would be the same (Because the amount of wealth produced would be the same as it is today.)
Capitalists aren't going to share their profit until we take it from them, either through taxes[1], or, ah, 'land reform'[2].
Output always creates more work, due to second law of thermodynamics (entropy). So, the more output you have, the more work you need to fight entropy. May be the Robots can deal with entropy too, but we aren't there yet.
If we're positing a fully robotic factory to create the products, I feel very comfortable positing that either a) the products are fully disposable, or b) there can also be fully robotic maintenance/fixing/organizing of said products.
- Delay thoughtful regulation of the technology - if you can delay it long enough until the entity gets big enough to fund lobbying efforts, its much easier to reach steady state/too big to fail status
- Gain access to government funding - as a consultant, if there's no existential crisis of being forever stuck in second place (no one wants to be behind), its much harder to provide thought leadership seminars/get fully paid vacations (i.e. speaking events).