The entrenched elite can always legislate protectionist policy and scale human effort horizontally through socialist interventions to make humans cheaper than s

The entrenched elite can always legislate protectionist policy and scale human effort horizontally through socialist interventions to make humans cheaper than state-of-the-art AI. This is especially true in the long interim between now and holy grail breakthroughs in object recognition. Charlatans and predators can always rally the surplus humans into being political forces to siphon off a percentage of productivity gain made by "good enough" AI. As an autonomous labor theorist, I'm kept up at night often about what to do with the surplus humans. On one hand, hard AI problems can be augmented with remote assistance and intervention. (A cleaner bot discovers spray paint on a wall.. is it graffiti, an advertisement, or part of a mural? Better summon a human eye to make sure.) On the other hand, "good enough" AI will allow total war scenarios to arise from the ashes as manufacturing millions of murder drones 1.) helps create employment for a nation and 2.) allows the extermination of the surplus for cheap. A human death squad takes about 16-18 years of investment to create. A "good enough" autonomous drone death squad takes about a week. The most immediate gains of autonomous labor will allow expansion into domains that are currently too expensive to get a foothold in or scale into. These opportunities are where many of the remote assistance jobs will be created. (Deep mining, space construction, etc) All eyes are on navigating the political climate until those price points are reached, which is why the cry for universal basic income is so tantalizing. Helicopter money on the plebs so they won't revolt and destabilize the global order that makes advanced robotic development possible. If they fail, then the attractiveness of cheap death squads to resolve the human surplus question will most certainly win.