predicts that non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than us with Nanotech foglets capable of making food out of thin air and creating any object in physical world. In less than fifteen years manufacturing, agricultural and transportation are almost entirely automated and employ very few humans. Throughout the world, poverty, war and disease are almost nonexistent thanks to technology. Armed services will be largely obsolete.
So we must now consider establishing new forms of economics because the general pubic will not be denied the benefits of these developments but the market will collapse from want of consumer's ability to buy and humans will have lost one of their greatest games.
Fortunately, as we have shared in prior essays, we in the United States have historical precedents that strongly support guaranteed incomes and development of national wealth through participatory economy, regulated fairness in markets and representative government.
To keep such a world going, until the AI machines want to run it without us or just retire of us, or tire of us, will take a vastly enlarged consumer market with greatly expanded buying power that we can only create by steadily enlarging guaranteed annual incomes. Billionaires buying power today could be mere pocket change by mid century for most people if we are not well on our way to being cooked. That is going to be accomplished with much social upheaval and wide, participatory planning. It will require real national and world wide plans and options to be offered by political candidates if participatory, representative government is to continue.
Some of our politicians will probably not be able to make the change from today's two party football politics pitting the Well Healed against the Raggedy Anns where one side relies on all those dreamers of becoming Well Healed. They can continue to argue that benefits to the Raggedy Anns amount to social welfare encouraging lay-abouts who contribute nothing. The Raggedy Anns will respond and point to rich children flying off to safaris in Africa, killing defenseless animals and acting like useless bums on a Florida spring break. Even if Kurweils medical miracles results in a procedure where the woman reabsorbs the embryo, the "pro life till its born" politiciasns and platform would still rail against death of any fertilized egg although it is estimated that seventy five percent of those conceptions do not go on to represent a full term pregnancy. But, it continues to be a great way to criminalize women, make them second class citizens, and create culture wars to keep the sport going and give the talking heads of the media some sound bites to chew upon.