[gkaivida1]

It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value.

Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.

That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"

Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.

[corimaith]

While it's not improbable to see some theoretical realized "sovereign" individual who can wholly run and own a civilization themselves as the sole master, that is ultimately the logical progression of the empowerment of the individual through Modernism, which we have signed up for as opposed to hunter-gatherers.

You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual.

But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.