Technology could enable abundance by century’s end, but it will be a rough road getting there (in our 3D-printed driverless EVs) if we don’t mitigate the near-term challenges of the transition (e.g., technological unemployment) with wise and nimble policy. In a Forbes article, Bernard Marr examines the possibility of machine-powered “Luxury Communism.” An excerpt:

What if the prognosis weren’t all doom and gloom?  What if all this automation were instead to provide so much luxury that we enter a post-work era, when humans are required to do very little labor and machines provide everything we need? 

This is the theory of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” an idea and ideology that in the (near) future, machines could provide for all our basic needs, and humans would be required to do very minimal work — perhaps as little as 10–12 hours a week — on quality control and similar oversight, to ensure luxury for everyone.

Robots, AI, machine learning, big data, etc. could basically make human labor redundant and instead of creating even further inequalities it could lead to a society where everyone lives in luxury and where machines produce everything.•