I think that because humans are social creatures, wealth and power will shift more towards actors, performers, and storytellers. Many nerds, including formerly myself, think that manufacturing and research is all-important. But even the people holding the guns, or commanding the robots that hold the guns, need social interaction.

You could say that advanced androids can provide social interaction, or a Matrix-like dream-world could divert the elite while their armies subjugate the planet in reality.

I don’t have an immediate answer to that. Without thinking it through completely, all I can say is I believe peoples’ desire for other people will preserve large chunks of society.

On topic, I was just made to “voluntarily” resign from my 6 per hour job because they were overstaffed. Darn.

I would suppose that reluctance on the part of the middle/lower class would be enough reason to stagger the evolution of robots into fully functioning components of the economy(think Japan and the internet LOL). These people remain the majority and democratic governments cannot put off ignoring their concerns indefinitely. After all, they are most at risk of being displaced by the robots. The resultant social problems will also pose a significant challenge to governments, assuming they don’t decide to leave their people to fend for themselves. (I guess this is where the social contract comes in?)

And due to the delay that all this causes, there will be a huge time window for a lot of other unexpected things to happen. Like WW3, or various corporations deciding to kill each other off in a twisted real-life version of Battle Royale D:

Oh and you spelt conversation wrongly <_<

Humans will forever be in the loop as long as machines cannot think. That is true. But the number of humans needed will be completely insignificant compared to current and past economy.

Even if we assume that human intelligence evolves to a point where every individual is capable of holding high-end research or management jobs, there simply aren’t that many jobs to go around.

We will still need engineers, but we don’t need 1 billion of them when schematics, inventions and designs can be distributed digitally and only the best ones put to actual use.

Of course the future is unlikely to follow my scenario due to millions of unaccountable factors. But my general argument is just that in a highly-advanced knowledge economy, the real economic value is produced by a very, very tiny portion of humans along with robots. Therefore, the majority of humanity will not be productive. Going by free-market capitalism, the majority of humans should not be rewarded with the products of the economy.

I think it comes down to whether economies become more socialist through active redistribution, or whether they become more polarized as a small minority earns an increasing larger share of the economy through pure meritocracy. And which one is “better”.

I think an argument can be made for either case.

This reminds me a lot of the The Culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture).

The average middle-class family in the USA enjoys a standard of living easily comparable to that enjoyed by an aristocrat of yesteryear. How so? Consider that comfortable shelter, heating, running water, entertainment, waste disposal and transport are available to the average family, without them having to do so much beyond spending 8 hours a day essentially supervising this system at a computer. The aristocrat probably had around 5-10 servants to perform these functions, but the modern family has none. There certainly still exists an underclass, a section of the population relegated to doing tasks that cannot yet be automated, but the majority of the labor that used to be performed is now either eliminated or at least greatly reduced in scope by modern technology.

What do we get when we extrapolate this trend going forward, barring some kind of technological Singularity? First, let me put forward that today, the average middle-class person’s contribution to society (2 hrs web surfing, 1 hr lunch, 1 hr tea break, 2 hrs in meetings and 2 hrs analyzing information) does not sum up to what they receive in material benefits from society. The surplus of course comes from technology that was invented by people, like Newton or Marconi, who basically ‘produced’ infinitely more value in their lifetimes than they ever consumed. We, as a race, are basically sitting on more and more ‘wealth’ as time goes on. You touch on this trend a bit in your text above.

However, I question why you assume that in a future where everyone could basically live like a King while barely doing any work whatsoever, that one group would attempt to seize power and monopolize the system to their own ends. True, this is a narrative that we’ve seen played and re-played throughout the ages. But is this current age not one where economic power is at is most dispersed? Certainly, there is a lot of power concentrated in the mega-corporations, but even they do not ‘rule’ their employees like despots from on high. In fact, I would say that now, more than ever, individuals are free to choose what to do with their lives. Again, I must qualify that we are still in transition, and as such there are certainly huge numbers of people to which this does not yet apply, but the onward march of technology has proven to be relentless, surviving the dark ages and more. I feel that it is inevitable that we will eventually settle into a steady state where there are more than enough resources for each person.

Human space colonization probably will become our only option. It’s not like we are all going to become otakus and cause our nation to have a declining birth rate *cough* japan *cough*. The only option would be to move to other planets such as mars. Moving to Mars to live is a whole problem of its own; however, this can stave off the problem long enough for people to realize that instead of
asking whether or not we’ll run out of fossile fuel
we’ll be asking whether we can explore and find planets fast enough.
I think that the nations all across the world will realize that the only way to stop mass extinction from new technology will be to hussle to get a space colonization project going. The borders will dissapiate and the Earth Federation will form. Massive exploration all across the world and will occur. Hopefully, nuclear fusion reactors have been made at this point. Even better would be for reverse engineering the brain to take a few hundred more years. Another nice thing would be if your robotic future would occur quite a few decades after we have “infinite energy” and have space colonization down to a T.

However, if there emerged a super conglomerate of corporations, contractors, sub-contractors, etc. (Samsung merging with Disney?) with the resources to practically create its own nation, then perhaps a dystopic robot-oriented world might be feasible. Before it gets overtaken by an actual nation’s established military force before it has the time to consolidate its means of defense. Also, EMPs by firing atmospheric nuclear weaponry would own all robots.

I have more to say, but I don’t think the complexity and impact of every single detail can be completely outlined in a single and novice comment by a padawan such as I.

My honest opinion is that you’re like 50 years too late. Your vision of the future is already obsolete.

If there’s one thing that speaks to me that the future will never going to be like that, it would be the way the US GNP/GDP breaks down by industry sector: service and high tech are the two largest sectors. This necessarily mean that humans will forever be in the economic loop, and economics, for the foreseeable future, be the ultimate measure of power in the world. More importantly, I think the US economy is likely the kind of economy that today’s developing worlds are morphing into, should they phase out the kind of transition that some first-world countries are experiencing (see: Japan’s economy).

Because it’s going to be a extremely long while until computers are smart enough to replace their inventors at inventing things, and in order to replace humans in service, it requires just as big of a power shift as any communist revolution.