[jjsheridan5]

I think if this is accurate you are going to have a massive welfare state. We could be headed back to more historical norms of wealth concentration, pyramid shape.

We are in the early stages of the greatest transformation humanity has ever seen (even greater than agriculture, the industrial age, or sliced bread). It will fundamentally change virtually every aspect of civilization. And even your contention involving "historical norms of wealth" will be anachronistic, since the very concept of "wealth" will fundamentally change (as will, incidentally, "welfare"). The marginal cost of production will asymptote towards zero, as will the cost of almost all "services" that humanity has ever known.

There is no real question that people will not have to work in order to have an abundance of what they need and want (this may be beyond the 30 year horizon), and that it will mean that, in order to produce enough goods and services for all of humanity, the average person will spend an ever shrinking amount of time on labor. The "welfare state" will be massive, but it won't come from a malevolent government. It will come from the ever shrinking cost of production.

[DIRTYSECRET]

We can all work for the government as members of the military. Conquer the world and bring along this sex machines to keep our morale up.

[PUGACHEV]

I agree. The concern about unemployment resulting from technologic advance reminds me of the workers who threw their shoes into the machinery in an attempt to stop the Industrial Revolution. Yes, there will certainly be temporary displacement now as then, but the end effect of technology is to make a worker many times more productive, and thus to increase, not decrease, the value of his labor. Put more simply, if one worker can now produce 10 widgets per hour, but with AI can produce 1,000, the value of that man’s working hour has increased a thousand fold. There is legitimate concern as to who will reap the benefit of that surplus value, the worker or his employer. Still, while the battle over the last two centuries between between Capital vs. Labor has been won so far rather resoundingly by Capital, but no one can say that the average worker today does not enjoy a far higher standard of living that his pre-industrial counterpart.