In the short term, it appears governments will simply print money to keep up with the increases in productivity. This partially offsets the increasing disparity between rich and poor. But shareholders may not continue to advance ahead of the masses because technology no longer needs capital. In recent decades capital was primarily used to gain monopoly status and market share instead of increasing production. Even market manipulation for shareholder and bank benefit can now be bypassed by distributed technologies; things like 3D printing, roof top solar cells, bitcoin, and hydroponic gardening. The crypto-technologies can even make governments and lawyers obsolete. Programming is the remaining skill needed, but more and more luck is what differentiates them. Compare Microsoft, HP, Apple, and Google founders to the founders of youtube, snapechat, and facebook. Instead of 5 to 10 years of hard work by pretty smart people, only 1 to 2 years of work by market-savvy LUCKY < 25 year olds (mere punks in some cases) with little computer skill are winning their first billion....and that billion is not capital investment in or for technology to help the market objectives, but merely buying market share for monopoly purposes by pre-existing monopolies that succeeded by pre-existing luck. Bill gates was not without luck or market savvy in acquiring DOS and taking advantage of IBM ignorance, but if the youtube buyout was not a wakeup call, then snapchat and facebook should have been a warning that this is a completely different world where skill, intelligence, ethics, and hard work are not path of the equation.
People simply spending money printed for them can't end well. We need challenges or at least goals in order to exhibit any sort of beauty.
More generally there are laws of physics that require entropy on in gravitational systems to decrease and this led to the biology and is leading to its end. Specifically, the entropy of the comoving volume of the Universe has been observed to be constant which means it decreases in "empty" space proper volumes which is offset by entropy being released by gravitational systems. So the rule "entropy always increases" is not as true as "Entropy is always emitted from gravitational systems in order to keep the comoving volume entropy constant as the Universe expands." Here on Earth we observe this entropy release as Gibbs free energy ultimately originating from the Sun creating higher energy bonds on Earth while releasing an excess entropy to the Universe. More specifically, 17 photons of lower energy each but same total energy per second are emitted in random directions to space for every incoming directed photon of high energy. The increase in entropy to the universe is the max potential decrease entropy on Earth, but the Earth is currently far from efficient in this, especially with fossil fuel use. Evolution is constantly trying to improve on the efficiency which can be seen from another physics law I'll state classically that originates from quantum mechanics satisfying the constant entropy of the Universe. (energy change of state that releases the lower-energy photons, i.e. thermal bombardments causing black body radiation). The classical principle is stationary action which is least action in the presence of thermal and quantum effects preventing stable maximum or saddle-point solutions. Least action minimizes average kinetic energy minus average potential energy over the shortest and longest time scales. Less kinetic energy means lower-energy collisions which reduces the per photon energy of emitted photons. Said another way lower kinetic energy means lower heat losses which means lower entropy. Lower entropy being my point. The second aspect is higher potential energy, which is also lower entropy for the following reason. Given that there are always a limited number of the types of bonds, if the highest energy bonds are maintained then the same type of bonds will be more frequent (copies) than if the bond energy were evenly distributed across all types of bonds. We view shells in animals as mere protection and pretend randomness somehow creates order in evolution, but there is a higher-level "force" at work that can be seen in least action that controls the end result of the randomness. Symbiosis at a system-wide level is more dominant than the errant selfish gene view (evolution is holistic, not ground up) "Selfish gene", if completely true, would eventually destroy all high-level order effects, never giving rise to what we see.
Least action is the most general and useful form of Newton's law, more general than Hamiltonian and Lagrangian approaches.
The highest energy bonds that we form on Earth are metal-metal, carbon-carbon, and silicon-silicon. These are used to store, capture, and transmit electricity, which includes computer thinking, and building strong structures. Lithium and now aluminum and other metals will be used to replace oil as fuel storage. Economics finds and COPIES the best technologies and the best are always the highest-energy long-lasting bonds. We think of this as fulfilling human desires, but it is a consequence of least action.
Copies of higher and higher bond energies are the two ways to lower entropy given a constant local mass in constant local volume (Earth's surface) at a (relatively) constant temperature and constant pressure. The other variables can change, but only in accordance with least action which will always result in lower entropy within the gravitational system. Even a black hole temporarily, I think, hides entropy in the highest-possible gravitational bond energy in the smallest volume with lowest possible kinetic energy, all exhibiting least action. I do not think entropy that can't be observed is "present" like entropy that is present in kinetic energy. To elaborate on this for those interested in physics: Using relativistic units meters=i*c*seconds (see Einstein's "Relativity" appendix 2) and replacing seconds with meters/i*c in all units and measurements to get rid of time as physically distinct from meters (as opposed to mathematically distinct i.e. i=sqrt(-1) ) and getting rid of speed as a physical measurement shows the deep reversibility of time. Then the entropy units of black holes becomes negative (from the units). None-reversibility of time ideas seem to depend on believing universal expansion is a "speed", which is physically unitless in relativity. "Speed" of light is physically unitless in relativity. All photons leaving all observers at the same speed means all observers are going ZERO speed relative to photons and requires the same photons to change energy which means they are not the same photons. All this can be resolved by letting "c" change with reference frames instead of forcing the idea of speed.
If we are "good" then the process that created us is "good". If that process replaces us, then the result is "good". By seeking efficiency in the marketplace (least action) and enjoying the competition that implements it, rather than trying to directly increase human happiness as a group that fights against nature, we are simply helping least action, aka the evolution of matter. We like making our species stronger and better, and everything in us strives for it. Stronger and better does not mean keeping our current form or thought processes.
Let's not fight it and raise a toast to our greatly superior "children" replacing us.
Electrical motors are only 100 times more efficient than muscles and replacing us on the farm and factory initiated the great depression. Not printing money fast enough made it worse, and it took us a decade to invent more war, welfare, mass marketing, fiat currency, and leisure to put enough money back into the system in order to keep the machines going. The U.S. department of defense is "welfare" to ourselves and to the world (not only the trade imbalance but our foreign military base system has always been increasing our balance of payments problem), protecting the machines at the same time it wastefully puts money back out there. As an electrical engineer, I can attest to how much more difficult it has been the past 3 decades in the U.S. to find the highest-tech jobs that were NOT military.
So we had to get education in order to replace muscle and figure out ways to efficiently and at the same time wastefully use the machines to keep them going. Now our brains are being replaced. Instead of 100 times more efficient, computers are currently 10 million times more efficient per dollar for any programmable task. All tasks are programmable, even desire. It is already happening system wide in ways we can't easily see. It's not a conspiracy, it's physics. The machines are already creating their own desire between themselves. People trying to figure out how to deal with this might end up killing each other, but at the same time there is plenty of hope: distributive technology can maintain the current mass of humans for a long time while greatly increasing the mass and bond energies of machines. Less hierarchical and peaceful society means more copies and less kinetic energy. War is a release of kinetic energy which least actions works against. DNA crystals are not exactly low energy bonds, and certainly contain an enormous amount of redundancy (copies=lower entropy), a lot more than anyone in the previous generation ever expected (Carl Sagan's estimate of the information content in the 1980's was 50 times too high). Bio-oils will remain competitive with metal-air batteries. Photosythesis is 20 times less efficient than solar cells on an area basis, but still price-competitive.
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