RE: Planned Obsolescence?
Something about how you put that reminded me of an observation I had related to the capability slider thought experiment. It goes like this:
-Begin with a population of super-AIs (slider set high)
-Value shifts entirely to the scarcity of resources used for production
-Now begin each AI player with an identical set of resources
?does any trade occur?
At first I thought no, but after looking at it more closely, I think some players would choose scarcity in some areas to have fulfillment in others in accordance with something equivalent to their version of 'Maslow's pyramid of drives'. There are a couple of solutions, one involving 'time sharing' with each player solving scarcity intermittently, and another involving seeking different equivalencies in the 'drive pyramid' and the players trading accordingly. In any event, it reveals the importance of a 'drive model' for evaluating competitions. Maslow's thingy is just a low rez proxy for a method of detecting and mapping goal structures in general.
Lol, when I removed all scarcity of production resources, I found I expected no trade to occur at all. For some reason, I am suspicious of that, as if I expect the AI to create artificial scarcity intentionally due to qualities from some possible goal structures. .
Markets will persist for the foreseeable future, and resource scarcity continue to necessitate trade. Resource scarcity will eventually become incompetent to affect production - but eventually is a broad term. We're not gonna see personally owned automated asteroid mining for some time, and such mechanisms are the only obvious means to eliminate resource bottlenecks.
I think it was Neal Stephenson that described a communal resource sharing mechanism in 'The Diamond Age' that might accelerate the end of resource scarcity to a large degree, but even that wouldn't preclude rockhopping robots hunting down rare Earth metals and the like.
I reckon you're quite right that in the meantime, resource scarcity will drive specialization and interindustrial trade, as that potentiates greater profit and market share, even desirable state of monopoly.