As the labour required to produce goods and services is automated, one possible scenario is that fewer and fewer people will stay "relevant", while the rest will sink and become invisible.
Things can be avoided, but looking at countries that have been unable/unwilling to ensure housing (as one of the 3 most fundamental material needs of the human: food, housing, clothing) stays affordable, does not raise hope. In my opinion, the housing problem is extremely easy to solve when looking at the problem as a technical one, and impossible when you include the way economic incentives are working at it.
I hope I'm wrong, but when I project the current path into future, it's not bright.
Second, a financial gap does not necessarily translate to a material gap. Someone with 1,000,000x someone else's net worth still buys the same iPhone and drinks the same coca cola. Many important wellbeing factors are not actually blocked by finance, like healthcare and education. Even if you take all the rich people's money and repurpose to education not much will change. Maybe an iPad for every kid, but what good does that do?
Housing is actually a great example. Real estate has a way of sucking up entire GDPs worth of money. As a country you can't pay your way out of housing problems. Look at something like China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.
It produces a two tier society where different rules apply to the rich and the poor.
It insulates the rich from the negative impact their actions have on the poor.
It results in the rich having a much greater say in democracy than the poor.
It produces problems when the rich and the poor are competing for resources (e.g. housing).
It can encourages the market to focus on the desires of the rich at the expense of the desires of the poor.
It damages social cohesion due to the rich and poor having increasingly different life experiences and worldviews.
That's like saying "the fact there's a black hole in the centre of the galaxy is not an issue."
Extreme wealth distorts the universe around it. There are people who have no business making nation-state level decisions that are still on the speed dial of the people who are, because of their financial positions.
There's also a strong case that education blocked by finance, on a second order. Wealth creates flight opportunities. Parents who can afford it take their kids out of the default public school and take them to a magnet, charter, or private school. Not everyone can afford that, even if some are nominally tuition-free-- if they don't offer the same bussing, for example, that's going to add thousands of dollars a year in bus or petrol costs to get the kid to and from campus.
But aside from that, when the parents take their kids away, they also take their volunteerism, activity support, and holding staff accountable. The public school ends up supported by the least resourced and least concerned parents, and the students left behind suffer.
Housing is probably solvable with a more holistic central-planning mindset. Everyone wants to live in a few desirable areas, but we have no mechanism to generate more desirable areas. A planned economy could help by steering new economic development to places where housing can be built affordably, perhaps with build-out mandates. The Chinese "Ghost Cities" are actually a great idea in retrospect-- if you build everything at once before the first residents arrive, you can avoid some of the very expensive retrofit problems. Building a subway on the barren ground of a planned city is a lot cheaper than drilling under Lower Manhattan.
A secondary problem is that housing costs and the need for retirement/end of life savings creates a doom loop-- if you're paying 60% of your income on a mortgage, you can't invest in any other way, so it HAS to be the nest egg. I'm not sure how to address that-- richer and more universal pensions might help reduce the load on home equity, and there are certainly ways to de-asset-ify land (maybe replacing outright land ownership with peppercorn leases-- people wouldn't be able to "buy" a house, at best they could try to bribe the existing owner to abandon the lease and hope to grab it when the property goes back up for redistribution)
I think it’s pointless to try to prevent this. Try to block it and parents who can afford to will just move to where the public schools are good.
There’s no level of forced equality (other than everyone living in abject squalor) where there won’t be a spread of resources and some will choose to direct theirs in less or more long-term productive ways.
The Chinese ghost cities are a terrible idea in every way. I am mystified as to how anyone would think those are a positive. Most of them will be left to decay without ever getting occupied.
The resources to improve the lives of the poor (and not just the very poor but the struggling middle classes), have to come from somewhere. They are not infinite. So unless you're creating a bunch of wealth from nothing, then it naturally requires a more equal distribution of existing wealth.
> China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.
This is in fact a problem of unequal distribution of resources: one of the main reasons there are housing issues is because houses have been seen as an investment and gobbled up by those who can afford to do so (all my friends in Beijing own multiple apartments), so prices rise and the poor can't get them anyway.
There are real diminishing returns to money. Some issues are surely caused by lack of funding, but that's not most real issues. Most real issues will remain even despite maximal funding. So before you start advocating for taking people's wealth you have to make a convincing argument that it can solve something.
The future is a tiny elite leisure class with all the wealth and property and access to robotics and automation that does all the work for them and a huge underclass with nothing, nothing to do, and no access to that automation. Plus something that physically isolated the elites from the have-nothings so they aren’t in danger.
Essentially if AI and robotics are so expensive that only the ultra wealthy can afford them, then that also means that it is unable to compete with human labor, and therefore economically irrelevant- human labor will be cheaper, and as a result still in high demand.
Since none of that makes sense logically, it cannot play out like that. I agree human labor is about to be replaced with cheaper automation and displace a lot of workers, and I can’t predict what will happen, but don’t think the exact scenario you describe is possible.
Why do you think the poor won't have AGI in their pockets and robots as well? If we look at how LLMs are evolving, they become easier to run on edge, and there are so many of them being pushed out every day. Costs for robotic hardware are also going down fast. Intelligence is free to have, unlike UBI. And robots can build robots, or make it cheaper to build robots.
For example instead of AI, take web search - if you are rich or poor, you get the same search space and tools. The rich are not searching better. They don't have radically better operating systems, social networks or phones. Same thing with content - we all have the same massive pool of content to watch. The rich don't have their own private movies that are 10x better.
In particular zero sum resources like land ownership will be an increased challenge.
And our governments have been slow to respond to things like climate change and we could be slow to respond here.
