Capitalism is driving itself out of business as the marginal cost to produce just about everything inches closer to zero, Jeremy Rifkin's new book, "The Zero Marginal Cost Society," proposes.Rifkin, a political consultant and social theorist, believes production costs have been lowered by the push for efficiency and productivity. As the trend continues, he projects drastic changes in how people live and run businesses, says Fortune in an overview of the writer and his book.The author paints a picture of a world in which consumers and businesses shift from expensive fossil fuels to renewable energy. Manufacturers may replace production workers and delivery drivers with robots and driverless vehicles.And Rifkin discusses the potential changes to be delivered by 3-D printing, noting that an MIT lab is working to develop a house frame in a single day “with virtually no human labor,” says Fortune.A powerful new technology revolution is emerging and will fundamentally alter our economic life, Rifkin wrote in a Huffington Post blog. In 25 years, almost every part of the global economy could operate for nearly free, he projected.These changes will be possible by the “Internet of Things,” which, as Fortune explains, will track and monitor how people communicate, how energy is assessed and delivered, and how products are built and delivered.The Internet of Things will connect everyone and everything, Rifkin asserts. And he claims it has boosted productivity so that many goods and services are already produced “practically free.”As we move deeper into this “new world,” Rifkin says, “corporate profits are beginning to dry up, property rights are weakening, and an economy based on scarcity is slowly giving way to an economy of abundance.”“Both capitalism and socialism will lose their once-dominant hold over society, as a new generation increasingly identifies with Collaboratism,” Fortune says Rifkin also projects.Social capital will become as important as financial capital, sustainability will supersede consumerism and access will trump ownership. And the “exchange value” that is now so prominent in the capitalist marketplace will be replaced by “sharable value,” writes Rifkin.He stresses that people are already using social media to share cars, homes and clothes. The Internet is already allowing online education in mass, redistribution clubs and cooperatives at low or near zero marginal cost.Aware of that there are doubters of his theories, Rifkin says most people would have doubted the developments of the past 25 years.Who would have believed huge global networks would allow hundreds of millions of people to exchange audio, video, and text? Who would have believed the combined knowledge of the world would be accessible from a cellphone?But these have become realities and are nearly free, Rifkin wrote in the Huffington Post.