QuoteYeah, that's the Star Trek/Culture post scarcity utopia I mentioned. All it would require is for people to work together and for those in power to give up a little to help everyone a lot...... awww crap.
See, that's the core of the issue here. Even if our technological tools do make possible a society where everyone(or at least most) is prosperous, living in peace, free to pursue their own interests and having a good life, without having money and more importantly power concentrated into the hands of few, it doesn't necessarily means it's going to happen(the worst thing is not income inequality - if everyone has enough, do we really care if some have private jets? Personally I don't care about that a bit. But I do care about the immense power that money affords them).
Not *everyone's* life will be improved in this society, assuming it's even possible. The proverbial "1%" or even 10%, pretty much everyone that is above middle class, will have objectively "worse" lives, have at least some of their privileges taken away. And experience shows us they're not going to give them up voluntarily(at least most of them). And let's not talk about the many people, especially in the US, that are not even part of the 1%, or even the 10%, or even the 20%, they are at the very bottom but still cling to the dream of making it to the 1%. They are *really* commited to it. They don't want a more fair world, where their place would be improved, because that would rob them of them imaginary future billions. And they will fight for them as if they're actually real.
Technology alone isn't enough to determine if we'll get the "nightmare" scenario or the "utopia" scenario or whatever in between. Humans are also political beings on top of making cool inventions; this will play a role in which future we get. My prediction is this : Capitalism has changed a lot during its history. It has made a lot of concessions to the working people(speaking about the Western countries mostly, countries in the Third World/Global South are something else entirely), the most important of those being the welfare state and universal suffrage. Not out of mercy of course, but it's not really in its interest to have hordes of starving people in the streets. It gives a little, it adapts, in order to survive. Its final and last concession will probably be the "Universal Basic Income". Depends how it's implemented(will we have a UBI on top of guaranteed universal healthcare, for example?), but it will probably happen. This will cause capitalism to yet again another take a very different form. I don't predict it has any more room to change again after that. The next change, if we assume we will have another change, will be something else altogether. And of course one other major change that will need to happen is that, whatever system we have, needs to be much more ecologically sustainable.
