With both these things, the question is how the social acceptance and the detachment of livelihood from employment comes about. Will it require revolutions and civil war with accompanying bloodshed when the downtrodden unemployed rise up? Or will we be collectively smart enough to reform our economic systems before the rift through society becomes too deep?
I personally think the bigger risks are AIs themselves, used as weapons or when they go out of control.
No. Given a roughly capitalist system as we have today, the vast majority of the economic benefits of AI is captured by "capital"[1]. People from a sufficiently rich and powerful background will not suffer like those who do not have any capital to speak of. Only those without capital need a basic income.
[1] Which is a problematic term, hence the quotation marks.
And until the AI army is ready, the AI capitalists can finance an elite of soldiers to keep the hungry masses at bay.
Remember, there are already lots of rich people who have as much leisure life as they want. And it's not a good thing for many of them. It's like a study posted on HN said a while back: you can have a meaningful life, or your can have a happy life. They are not the same thing. The more people that have meaningful lives, whether sweeping the streets, inventing new things, or writing novels? The better we all are. The more people choosing simply to be happy? Society will stagnate and die.
So this isn't some case of somebody telling somebody else what to do. Assuming we are entering the age of "robots do everything", our species has a crisis of meaning at hand.
A) the 1%: capitalists financing (and controlling) AI, will get phenomenal rewards once AI has taken over production of basic utilities, food, water distribution. Only political control will keep AI monopolies from appearing.
B) the 49.5%: those lucky enough to get a job in one of the areas not taken over by AI. They will have to be extremely competent, and lower their salary: they are competing in a very limited and not necessarily very complicated skill-sets (those skill-sets not taken over by AI) with 99% of the human population
C) the other 49.5%: those who are not making the cut to get a job.
(the sizes of the groups B & C obviously depend on the number of available jobs)
People will be able to move from B to C, but never to A (since building an AI empire from scratch is impossible, specially when capital has become extremely concentrated)
People in B are barely making ends meet, and people in C are in continuous existential danger. Political engagement drops to a minimum. Capitalists collude to create monopolies, raise prices and basically destroy democracy. The human race splits in two distinct classes, and the lower class is basically enslaved.
