I'm concerned that this is one of the great problems that humanity can't deal with, like the tragedy of the commons. Only a small percentage of the population

I'm concerned that this is one of the great problems that humanity can't deal with, like the tragedy of the commons. Only a small percentage of the population recognizes that freedom from labor is a positive thing. So the way I see it, we have two choices: 1) let the small percentage automate their way to freedom and the rest can join if they wish 2) adopt automation on a wide, institutional scale the way we did with public education and social security Unfortunately, with the political slant of the country leaning so far towards libertarianism at the moment (government = bad, taxes = bad, welfare = bad, etc) I am becoming more convinced every day that we will go with option #1 and create a two-tier society. The tiny elite today has trouble discerning where unearned income comes from. They don’t seem to care if their capital gains come from a working class or automation. As someone who dabbled in dead end manual labor jobs for most of my 20s, I find that appalling. It’s like trying to talk to someone about vegetarianism who has never slaughtered an animal by hand. So, these things will probably go the way they always go. A small percentage who sacrifice tremendously for the greater good of society, with the masses riding the coattails of progress glibly unaware of it. I suppose in the end that that has always been the American way, or at the very least, the western way. Maybe a path towards enlightenment is to picture a day in the near future as we approach the singularity and find that economic gain is no longer tied to labor. It’s going to be a bit like winning the lottery, here and there, small amounts at first but growing larger every day. I will believe that automation has arrived when I begin seeing random acts of selflessness by people who recognize that financially, they have arrived. As in, randomly receiving a call one day that your credit card bill has been paid in full. Or maybe a city receives a large donation for the building of bike paths. Or a solar panel installer goes door to door and gives people free kits to get off the grid and never pay another electric bill. I think small, targeted amounts of money injected directly into the system like that could be quite disruptive. So in the end such ominous changes could come to pass with a whimper instead of a bang. It could be one of the great advances in civilization that people thousands of years from now look back at in awe, wondering how we ever transitioned from a dog-eat-dog hierarchy to egalitarian anarchy. I guess they will have just had to have been there, witnessing the epic stupidity that we’ve witnessed over the course of our lives. Stepping back from that, rejecting it summarily is not such a hard thing to do. Not if you grok that the other side of the threshold is not just possible, but probable. And then be willing to take a leap of faith and persevere long enough to see it through.