Your humor-detection unit is bust

A "free market" is one based on voluntary interactions and non-force-based interference, private property, and a legal system that recognizes these rights and attempts to protect *from* force-based interference with free/voluntary trade and protect private property rights. It has never been tried anywhere - not even closely. E.g. laws against sex work, for example, are a severe force-based interference on free/voluntary trade. This is just one small example of the massive amounts of force in the system, from fiat currency laws, exchange regulations, customs, border controls, patents and other "Intellectual Property" laws, protectionism, visa and other laws against freedom of movement, immigration law, etc. We live and breathe force in our current "market system" in every way, every day.

the poor won't be able to afford AI to work for them. Right now, if I needed an AI to do anything, I just couldn't afford it

Your tenses are mixed up - you jump from future to present but juxtapose them as if inaffordability "right now" implies inaffordability decades from now.

Imagine you made this comment in 1970: "The poor won't be able to afford mobile phones. Right now, if I needed a mobile phone, I couldn't afford it" - AC 1970. That's what you just did.

A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?

My dog can jump through hoops. He's great at it, but nobody really cares. His masters still feed and house him. So the trick is to program our new robot "masters" to feed and house us .. or something like that. Dogs don't really have "jobs". They don't "go to work". We are to them, like robots will be to us.

Your cynicism is misplaced, but not lacking in point entirely: In certain respects, the future can and probably will be post-scarcity - e.g. I suspect things like 'food, water and basic housing' will be possible to produce at relatively tiny marginal cost once largely automated - possibly even some kind of replication for food.

What will NOT be easy "post-scarcity" will be *land allocation* - rich people will live in the most beautiful, prime locations - e.g. scenic seaside areas - so you will have your free food, free 'basic house', free running water - but the area itself will probably be less than wonderful, unless you were fortunate enough to have inherited enough wealth to live in a nice area.

This is mostly similar to today, come to think of it, except for the post-scarcity part.

Most people seem to be missing the historical significance of this. Today it's just a plastic wrench, yes. In another 50 or 100 or 500 years? 3D-printing (or 'custom local manufacturing', or a 'replicator', or whatever you want to call it) is going to play an important part in all our extra-planetary exploration endeavors - and historically, humans of the future will be looking back at this crappy plastic wrench as the first real-world example of a 'replicator' producing something in space.

A few other brief points:

1. There are NO active projects anywhere to build space elevators. The technology doesn't exist. @GP AC: Nobody is spending your tax money on space elevators, so stop hysterically hyper-ventilating about non-existent straw-men.
2. In the long run, colonizing other planets and star systems will be the single-most important achievement we'll ever make as a species. Ever. Nothing can top it - it will be the most historical event in human history, bar none. It takes a small mind not to grasp this. Contrast that against the tiny budget we allocate to it, it's actually absurd. We spend more on booze each year.
3. The idea we should cancel all space programs because "wow, we found a new species of fish at >8000m!" is retarded.
4. Unlike finding a new type of fish, being a multi-planetery species will help ensure our survival - there are many potential Earth-wide human-extinction events that will eventually statistically occur - not "might occur", but *will occur* - e.g. asteroids have wiped out most life on earth *multiple times* in the planet's history.

One of the problems is that the majority of the American public still think the space program sinks a significant portion of the federal budget. Reality is it's less than 0.5% of expenditure - we could cancel every last bit of space-related research and it would hardly even register as a blip in terms of increased money available to spend on anything else.

To be fair, Android/iOS are not exactly innovative either - they just managed to get themselves in the 'right place and right time' for the smartphone trend - but if you look at "innovation", the only thing they've innovated, is the business models (e.g. "app store" distribution cartels that reap 30% from ISVs).

Microsoft haven't done squat in the past, but they have a new CEO with a very new approach - I'll be watching them closely. This is not the Microsoft of old. And Google has already become the new Microsoft, engaging in the same dirty tactics Microsoft used to.

I've worked extensively with both, and while .NET is much faster to develop applications in (developer-productivity-wise), C/C++ still makes for much better *client application performance*. For simpler applications, this doesn't matter so much. But for any relatively complex application, it becomes important.

This doesn't mean Java is "killing" .NET because it neglects an important factor: Most the Java jobs are probably for smartphone development and most the .NET jobs are probably for desktop app development. Smartphones are inherently a bigger "ecosystem" by the absolute numbers, simply because the ratio of smartphones to desktop computers is high, but that doesn't mean desktop computers are going away at all in the in-some-ways-still-more-important "getting real work done STILL needs a desktop computer" segment.

I'm pretty sure there's plenty of walls and other 'handles' to hold onto on the ISS and use for "leverage".

What *would* be disturbing is if this printing of a wrench was due to literally *not having a wrench* at all anywhere on the ISS.

Your comment is so wrong on so many levels, it's fractally wrong. I don't even know where to start.

If it's sentient, it will be a "life form". The tricky part is devising a scientific test for sentience - that's beyond our current level of knowledge - however, it might not be in future.