The way the economy is structured, i.e. a consumer economy in a "democracy" that trend can't sustain in the long run. If the fruits of economic production incre

The way the economy is structured, i.e. a consumer economy in a "democracy" that trend can't sustain in the long run. If the fruits of economic production increasingly become centralised in fewer and fewer hands then eventually either people will clamor for their slice of the pie, resulting in re-distribution via taxes and social programs like UBI or the system will collapse from insufficient consumption. Also your comment assumes things like AI, driverless tech and so on are going to be readily available in the near future. Evidence suggests the contrary. I bet there will not be widespread driverless taxis even two decades from now. Even if it is possible to create a toy demostration like Waymo has done it is far from clear that such a model is economically feasible. I.e. for a very long time it will be cheaper to hire a person to drive a car than to program and build a car to drive itself after accounting for remote supervision, maintenace, cleaning cost. Despite all the talk of automation in industry not much has happened in many industries because it is still cheaper to pay somebody $15 an hour to do some manual task than to buy a 1.5 million dollar robot (those SWE salaries again) to do the same task especially considering it will need high paid engineers, operators, and technicians to install, run (supervise) and maintain it. The way for tech to replace manual labor is for the wages of manual labor to go up and the price of tech to come down. If tech drives down low skill wages then it exerts a feedback effect limiting the adoption of tech.