[amikula]

Actually the people who had the wealth to build the non-human labor force become the rulers of our society. Their corporations will become the new governments and campaign against one another for control of resources. What happens at that point is anyone's guess.

[Kliment]

This is a real danger. There are several ways to counter it. One is to make as much production technology as we can open source and ensure it is well spread. This is what the RepRap and Open Source Ecology projects are doing, and the progress has been tremendous over the past years. Publishing everything counters patent threats, GPL-like licenses prevent exploitation without contribution, self-replicating machines make the technologies both cheap and available. This is my favorite way of countering the threat.

Other methods include government intervention, revolution of the (ex-)workers, consumer boycotts (off the grid communities) and benevolent corporates. None of them are as effective, and very few of them can be worked on in the short term.

[redwood]

I believe we're approaching this point. The least noticed big news of the year was Foxconn's announcement that it plans to replace its workers with robots in the next two years. The fact that robots have reached even the Chinese labor price means robots will always be preferred when manufacturing returns to the US. So how will we distribute the wealth? I suspect the masses will vote in a form of distribution and would rather see it some kind of force employment than a government handout.