As many of you may have noticed, there are many people around this sub and the overall topic of futurism that hold the view (or make the prediction) that the future technological progress will bring an anti-egalitarian society with very few billionaires at the top and a pauperized rest of the population.

This view is interesting in that it depicts a very familiar view, the view of the XIXth century. Indeed, the societies of this time were anti-egalitarian and dictatorial, both politically and economically beyond words. Very restrained circles of elites owned everything while the rest of the population soused in revolting misery, suffering the worse of indignities and terror (slavery, child labor, no women's rights, censorship, and so on). Rare historical anomalies of this horror subsist to this day (North Korea, Iran, Russia's invasion...etc).

But there are two problems with this view being ascribed to the future. First of all, it's projection. Second of all, it fails to describe accurately the XIXth century.

Indeed, XIXth century's societies were highly unstable, dynamical, fluid, always on the verge of collapsed, with constant revolutions, civil wars, coups d'état (my country alone has had 3 revolutions back then, 1830, 1848, 1871) and strong political movements. And those struggles continued and gave birth to our current societies, democratic and much more respecting human decency. Although there are lots (and i mean that word passionately) of improvements still to be done, the progress when compared to the XIXth century is staggering. Think of slavery, child labor, freedom of the press, women's rights, welfare, minimum wages, retirement, social housing, free mandatory education (even college here), universal healthcare (you can guess i'm not writing those lines in the USA...) etc. And there are still movements that expect for more.

The XIXth century wasn't a static eternal situation. and those social movements were brought partially by technological progress. Thinking that the next century will just be a never ending XIXth century seems simplistic in that it only shows a picture of a single second of that century, and not all the processes in action in that time.

You may object that this is projection too. Indeed, since we're here talking about singularity, it means the future past that point is impossible to describe. In such case, predicting XIXth century on the future is meaningless and purely... projection.

But for those that don't think there will be a singularity, or not right away, the prediction they make is simply a static safe state of the XIXth century. And even if this prediction didn't make the mistake of only taking a single point, it would be a linear description of events, expecting only the XXIIth and XXIIIth century to be perfect copies and repetition of the former two. Which not only does not take into account singularity, but even a non linear possibility of evolution, something history has shown us multiple times, both in good and bad (florishing times and civilizational collapses).

This is why this type of prediction seems limited to me.

And aside of reading tea leaves, there is also analysis of said process: the view criticized here omits the fact that our economy is largely based on consumerism. And consumers play a huge economical role. A good read i recommend on that topic is "The Brussels effect: how the European Union rules the world", by Anu Bradford. It shows how, by being a common market of half a billion consumers, the EU impacts the world's economy by mere choices of consumation: a change in fad in european consumers and millions of chinese and indian companies must shift their whole production to the new demand. The same applies to the US. The current big companies are, indeed, excessively powerful, but they do not hold absolute divine powers like Ancien Régime rulers (close, but not there yet...).

An old joke illustrates this point:

A big car making company just bought a brand new army of robotic arms able to produce cars with only one employee monitoring them, firing thousands and thousands of employees rendered superfluous. The boss, all giddy from his new purchase, invites the union leader to visit his robotic factory, where he can see an endless row of synchronized robotic arms (and one half asleep employee). The union leader looks at this show, perplexed. The boss, to laugh at him, tells him "you must be wondering how you're going to unionize them, right ?" and the union leader answers "no, i'm woundering with what money are they going to buy your cars."

I do not, by any means, believe in a utopian flowery future (except if there is an impredictible event such as... the singularity, by definition). The view criticized here has the merit to describe problems in the current society, remnants of the old one. But i find equally caricatural and simplistic the view of an eternal XIXth century with no dynamics in it, no impact of the future tech on its structure, just a magical XIXth century existing on its own in a glass snowball world.

I believe the future will either be nuanced, complex, multiple, made of progresses, bumps and constant evolutions. Or impredictible ineffable.