it would be illegal for you to offer a kid-safe internet service

Actually, it would be trivial to eliminate this problem. Simply put, you sell "Kids On Line" and make no claims about it being "the internet" and everyone is happy. Be sure to mail out plenty of floppies and cds with 12 free hours of service, it's a proven winner!

If nothing else, the key takeaway from Brave New World is that the Alphas and Bravos need to be thankful that the Deltas and Epsilons do all the hard work, and the Deltas and Epsilons need to be thankful that the Alphas and Bravos are there to do the hard thinking and responsibility. Without that, they'll kill each other at the earliest opportunity regardless of economic system.

I think it's a tough call to claim that the term "open source" was *originally* invented in the 90's.

The problem is that everything and Sun's dog were "open" since the 80's. OpenLook, OpenWindows, OPENSTEP, Open Software Foundation, X/Open Group and so on. I am fairly certain that this is part of why RMS went all-in on "free software" instead of "open source", because the world already had plenty of "open" programs that were "source available". Trying to figure out when exactly the term "open" transitioned from "Foundation members and/or Sufficiently Paying Customers can review code but make no modifications or use of it" to "anyone can modify, use and share this code" needs to be solved by digging through the Deeper Archives From Before the Dawn of Internet, but unfortunately this predates the Wayback Machine and Google made their usenet archive unusable.

Never mind that the booster is never in an orbit.

Sure it is! It just happens to be an orbit with a periapsis smaller than the Earth's radius.

with public works projects like rebuilding Europe as fiscal stimulus.

Robots would do that cheaper, just saying.

will let us work 10% less

Sure.

and retain the same pay and productivity

AHAHAHA dream on, sucker.

Japan already has a film about that.

We already know how it will go: the companies will whine to the government about how they can't find any employees with the skills they demand (such as "willing to work for $5/hr"), and demand that the government do something about it or they won't be cutting any more checks next campaign season.

Something will be done, whether it's government-paid retraining or (more likely) more immigrants.

How fast do you imagine this technology will grow?

Let's say that Ford invents AI tech that allows them to fire every single employee tomorrow and run their entire factories lights-out. How much can they undercut their competitors with a nearly $0 labor cost? (Let's say they pay Amazon Turks $0.05 a review to double-check the AI-designed cars and make sure they look like something a human would want to drive.) How much will the stockholders' profit while the other companies struggle to catch up?

Once Ford pulls the trigger, how many quarters of losses and negative earnings reports do you think it will take for GM, Subaru, etc to do the same? Say GM decides to hold out and runs a "Buy Human" marketing ad (has "Buy American" ever actually worked?) how many GM employees are going to use their salaries to buy GM trucks over cheaper RoboFords?

Personally, I imagine that once each specific field is automated, it will rapidly become totally automated (on the scale of financial quarters once the lagging companies' stocks take a beating). How about RoboShipping? Humans won't be able to compete against $0 labor plus reduced insurance costs. Once RoboTrucking can be done, it will be done as quickly as RoboTrucks can be made and/or retrofitted into existing trucks. We will probably never develop "general" AI, just a lot of task-specific ones that only have to be invented once each.

the basic justification for enforcing conformity

It's not really, though. If you assume that we are the sum of our inputs, then punishment and/or observation of punishment is itself yet another input.

OK Google. Talk to me about my investments.

10 PRINT "BUY LOW COST VANGUARD OR SCHWAB FUNDS"
20 GOTO 10

BTW, There are people working on this for real.

If human judgement is needed, it's far easier to train someone to decide whether an alternator armature is worth refurbishing than to rebuild an engine. Then you sit them down to do nothing but screen alternator armatures all day.

And you feed pictures of those armatures and the human's decision to the AI so it can learn to do the job cheaper and faster.

While it won't deal with switching the USB hub, have you considered using Synergy to share mouse/keyboard between the computers? The way it works is you lay out your displays and computers, and tell it when you go off the right side of monitor 2 of PC 1, pass control to monitor 1 of PC 2 and the mouse (and keyboard input) appears there. As a bonus, it can transfer the clipboard between computers too.