Will it transition? I mean most opportunities in the past to reflect diminishing have been taken advantage of by the already wealthy- who often get to control how the new surplus society creates is distributed. Why would this be any different? The material wealth of the industrial revolution wasn’t brought to the masses before actual revolution in some cases and then conciliation by the rich to buy off revolution in others, like in the new deal.

We’ll see a massive decrease in the purchasing power of the working classes due to the increased leverage ownership of AI and manufacturing technology gives to the wealthy, probably a new flood of people to the “gig” economy and informal economy, and further bloated budgets for defense and policing to crack down on increasing unrest brought by economic uncertainty as well as the impacts of climate change. Now more goods than ever will be produced, so when I say purchasing power will decrease dramatically for those not already wealthy, I want to elaborate: many goods will decrease in price dramatically, but the benefit of this will, for the lowest portions of the population, be outweighed by dramatic increases in prices of things like housing, as well as the massive downward pressure on wages a more competitive labor pool will experience as mass unemployment takes hold. We’ll likely see some incremental reform, say a Universal basic income or something similar, but not to any degree to change the fundamental shift in power dynamics a singularity would cause.

This much seems certain, but what happens from there is a question we’ll have to wait on. I for one am hopeful that age of peace and unprecedented prosperity is on the other side of this, but with the institutional structures of our day where they stand, it will take significant struggle to see this through even when the technology advanced to a point where it’s possible to live post scarcity, and the outcome of that struggle is not inevitable.