Scientific and technical progress, which has taken on a new quality under the conditions of the so-called digital revolution, threatens to do away with labour as a factor of production, if not in the immediate term then in the fully foreseeable future. Developing in uncontrolled fashion, this scenario is fraught with tectonic changes to the entire system of social relations. The least of these changes will be the slide of the global economy into an endless depression. The article examines the conditions, inherent in the “digital economy”, that discourage economic growth; the financial instruments that make up for the corresponding adverse consequences; and the new forms of creative activity that under conditions of total automation and robotisation, are capable of posing an effective alternative to labour as a factor of production and distribution – and in the first instance, an alternative to mass crowd-sourcing in the scientific and technological sector in general, and in the field of scientific enquiry in particular.