Good points. That said, "The Midas Plague" is a funny story that redefines laziness in a world of robot-and-fusion-energy-produced abundance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. ..."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/scie...
        "Death is the inescapable conclusion of life. But what happens after death is still a highly debated topic. Throw into the mix a heady combination of religious belief and scientific theories, and you have the potential to create an endless array of possibilities. One intriguing notion is called quantum immortality. Imagine that the universe splits into countless parallel realities after any small event. Now, say for example, you end up in an accident. In the quantum immortality theory, there will always be one version of reality where you survive, and this is the reality your consciousness keeps experiencing. While it sounds like an appealing theory, it is purely hypothetical and highly debated. Let's find out where the theory originated, how it developed, and the differing opinions on its validity. ...
        The roots of this idea can be traced back to Hugh Everett III. In 1957, Everett first proposed the concept which we now refer to as the Many-Worlds Interpretation. He suggested that the entire universe can be described by a single wave equation that never collapses. The many worlds idea was later popularized by physicist Bryce DeWitt in the 1970s.
        However, Everett never mentioned anything about immortality in how own work, with that idea only surfacing decades later. Various versions of the quantum immortality idea emerged in the mid to late 1980s and were discussed by individuals such as Euan Squires, Hans Moravec, and Bruno Marchal. So, while the Many-Worlds concept is still widely discussed by physicists, the quantum immortality idea is a recent addition considered fringe by many experts. ..."

Going with your main idea, if it has any validity, perhaps 1999 is a more likely year? :-)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=worl...

Some possible solutions to the changing nature of work (especially given AI) collected by me from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society. ..."

This video by me from 2011 focuses on the general idea of five interwoven economies that emerged from that exploration (with a Slashdot reply to a comment of mine suggesting adding "theft" which I did):
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

Here is a recent article of how the "theft" economy is sadly increasing in the USA as the social contract breaks down with the increasing rich-poor divide:
"The United States of Fraud"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/art...
        "... Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Having a friendly local grocer and corner store guy who's known you since you were a baby is increasingly rare. They've been replaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy -- AI -- promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us.
        Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords. They're engaging in spurts of shoplifting, taking part in return shenanigans, and using their credit cards for "friendly fraud" that's anything but. They see -- or at least excuse -- these acts not as stealing but as small moments of deserved vengeance in a system that violates their sense of basic fairness at every turn."

As I see it, unless we strengthen those other four economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned) then theft and other forms of social breakdown are an almost inevitable response. Granted, the rich (1%) will have robots and AI now to use against the poor (the 99%), so it is possible things may play out differently this time. Either way we probably end up with a society of abundance for all -- as either the poor (i.e. the 99% will change the political-economic rules of the game and everyone will have a lot of abundance) or the rich 1% will kill everyone else and then the Earth will be left with just the uber-wealthy and their robots.

Well, that is unless violence arising from such a conflict destroys everything or the AI and robots take over from the 1% or some other such disaster happens. Sadly, this OSCOMAK project I hope for has not gotten very far yet to help mitigate such disasters: https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us: ... Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects ..."

Like Bucky Fuller said (paraphrasing), humanity is in its final exam in the universe, and it will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end leading to utopia or oblivion.

James P. Hogan's 1982 "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel is a great exploration of the idea of an post-scarcity robot-and-AI-and-fusion-energy economy where people focus on gaining status by their contributions not their consumptions.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "... Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ...
        It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
      I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

Of course, an imploding economy would be a nightmare for Wall Street... So, not a very electable platform...

See: "Old Western TV Show Predicts Trump"
Excerpts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"A 1958 episode of the Western TV show "Trackdown" features a con man named Trump who comes to town and promises that he alone can save the townspeople from the end of the world. He is accused of being a fear-mongering snake oil salesman and they try to stop him, but Trump threatens to sue. Then the high priest of fraud promises to build a wall! The episode is called "The End of the World"."

Sounds a lot like what some AI company CEOs are also doing according to the article -- by using fear mongering to control the narrative and concentrate wealth? Of course, sometimes fears are well-founded, so it is a complex issue. AI could become a destructive force -- even as Alfie Kohn suggests more nuance and understanding "projection":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/blog...
        "Another form of projection, also employed by groups rather than individuals, attributes certain features to the nonhuman realm. One example was offered recently by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He observed that tech titans sometimes warn us that AI could (a) eventually acquire intelligence that surpasses that of its creators and then (b) use that intelligence to dominate us, eventually leading to human extinction. But why do they assume that (a) would lead to (b)?
                "Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?...When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.... Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that's the attitude they adopted....The way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own."
        The techno-doomsters, in other words, may think they're warning us about AI, but what they're actually doing is showing us an MRI scan of their own septic psyches."

That said, some of the Trump administration's ostensible initiatives or ideals make sense to me (e.g. questioning the H1-B visa, emphasizing re-shoring manufacturing, questioning a dysfunctional sick-care system, questioning the ~65 million aborted US Americans and more for kids they might have had in turn since Roe v. Wade -- even as there is legitimate debate about what to do about all these issues and whether Trump administration (and "Project 2025") policies might make ultimately make some of these concerns worse -- same as with AI as in this article).

Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (perhaps AI-assisted) is a way for small groups of people to productively visualize and explore the thought landscape of such "wicked problems" in a productive way. A talk I gave on that:
https://cognitive-science.info...

And Trump undoubtedly has been over the years a very smart, charismatic, and humorous guy -- even if his humor is sadly often of the harming variety instead of the healing variety. From:
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
      "Taking Humor Seriously
        By Joel Goodman
                "There are three things which are real:
                God, human folly, and laughter.
                The first two are beyond our comprehension.
                So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)" ...
        Although joke-telling is one way to transmit humor, it's not the only way. In fact, there are literally thousands of ways to invite smiles and laughter in addition to joke-telling. So, if joke-telling is not your forte or if it is inappropriate for you to become the stand-up comic on-the-job, then there are alternatives. Here are four tips to get you going: ... (2) Use humor as a tool rather than as a weapon. Laughing with others builds confidence, brings people together, and pokes fun at our common dilemmas. Laughing at others destroys confidence, ruptures teamwork, and singles out individuals or groups as the "butt". In the words of one fifth grade teacher, "You don't have to blow out my candle to make yours glow brighter." Humor is laughter made from pain, not pain inflicted by laughter. I subscribe to Susan RoAne's AT&T test- is the humor Appropriate, Timely, and Tasteful? If so, you can reach out and touch people positively with humor. ..."

Humor is often an antidote to excessive fear. We've had the potential to become a humor-powered post-scarcity society for decades or maybe even centuries or millennia, but politically-rooted scarcity fears have held humanity back (for good or bad).

Related is my ironic-humor-pivoting sig which applies to AI as well as many other technologies ranging from nuclear energy to just the humble transistor: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Although, as the book "Abundance" written "by liberals, for liberals" suggests, there are many aspects of the current US political order that impede effective solutions by emphasizing legalistic process over desirable results (and a different approach to making such decisions is one reason China is pulling way ahead of the USA in many areas). The book's authors suggest providing subsidies to people using systems unable to grow due to dysfunctional rules just results in essentially artificial scarcity and inflation (examples include housing, transportation, energy, and medical care):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, there is some legitimate righteous anger at bureaucratic dysfunction which Trump has harnessed for political gain. The deep question is, as Mr. Fred Rodgers' sang, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" Something similar could be sang about "fear". Trump is one answer to such a question, but there are presumably other possible answers...

As John Taylor Gatto suggests in "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher": https://www.informationliberat...
        " ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
        Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.
        With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
      All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith."

So most teachers earn their money doing well what it is teachers are supposed to do (as planned in Prussia in the 1800s when compulsory schooling was introduced to make Prussia a military power).
https://odyssey-fm.com/why-sch...
https://metropolis.cafe/2017/0...
https://dukereportbooks.com/bo...
        "The Prussian Blueprint
        In tracing the roots of American education, Gatto illuminates the foundational influence of Prussian schooling. In 19th-century Prussia, the state constructed a comprehensive education system to mold loyal, obedient subjects. The purpose was explicit: to instill uniformity, suppress individuality, and ensure that children would grow into citizens who followed orders. America adopted this model eagerly, not because it worked educationally, but because it aligned with elite interests.
        This importation was neither organic nor public-driven. It was orchestrated by a coalition of industrialists, politicians, and academic theorists who viewed schooling as a tool to engineer society. They believed in planned progress and social stability, achieved not through democratic participation but through controlled upbringing."

So, the big -- and usually unacknowledged -- issue is that what teachers (and schools) are supposed to do (turn kids into obedient dumbed-down low-initiative robots for industry and warfare cannot fodder) is no longer something our society needs (if it ever did) or wants.

Until people accept compulsory schools are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and are doing it very well, it is hard to have a productive discussion about changing -- or abolishing -- them. And likewise, it is hard to have a productive discussion about how educational computing should be used in schools when compulsory schooling has very little to do with education.

As I suggested in 2008 in "Post-Scarcity Princeton":
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?"

AI is just one more aspect of that trend of post-scarcity technological change, as (AI-based) one-on-one tutoring is now cheap (or effectively free if you are paying for AI access for other reasons).

Indeed, educational videos on-demand to reflect current interests and needs via YouTube or elsewhere are another example of how compulsory schooling is increasingly obsolete.

Thanks for the Alfie Kohn link. He is an amazing insightful compassionate writer whose words have shaped some of my beliefs. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Pat Farenga, and Grace Llewelyn are some other writers who have shaped my beliefs on education -- as are stories from sci-fi writers like James P. Hogan (e.g. "Voyage from Yesteryear"), R.A. Lafferty ("Primary Education of the Camiroi"), and Ursula K. Le Guin ("Always Coming Home", "A Wizard of Earthsea") and others.

Almost everything has pros and cons, and it is true that free schools or progressive schools have some benefits. Sadly, as I wrote here circa 2009:
https://pdfernhout.net/towards...
        "See, that is the false choice -- suggesting you either confine a child to [school as] prison or they will commit their first violent crime and have to be imprisoned [as a truant]. That is a very dim view of human nature, neighborhoods and families. Yet, it is a self justifying view, in part destroying the very neighborhood fabric it claims to be defending. So, we are left with streets that are safe because there are no people on them. We have successfully destroyed the village in order to save it, using compulsory schooling instead of napalm."

One reason given for sending a child to compulsory school is so they will be around kids their own age -- ignoring that the only reason there are not kids their own age around during the weekday is precisely because of compulsory school (and even on weekends there is homework and then making up for missed family time during the week due to schooling which tend to keep kids indoors).

As a former high school debater, I especially like this point by Aife Kohn on the dark side of debate training from the page you linked to:
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
        "Kohn: I grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, a very odd place, where the median age was deceased. I went to a large public high school, which was an intellectual wasteland. I didn't do sports. I had elements of competitiveness to be sure - in punning, for example. But in high school I was a nationally ranked debater. And although I was winning and liking it, it took me years to unlearn the poisonous messages I was taught: that any argument can be successfully defended if you're clever enough. And that winning is what counts most. I still describe myself today as a recovering debater. Sports carries with it its own set of problems, but competition is not limited to that. So when people say we need academic awards, debates, science competitions, and national spelling bees, what I hear them saying is, "Well, we destroy the athletes by turning their lives into an attempt to defeat everyone in sight - why shouldn't we do that to everyone else, too?""

And from the end:
        "Thuermer: If you had to reinvent yourself tomorrow, Alfie, what would you do?
        Kohn: I think if my career takes a turn in the next ten years, it's likely that I'll be thinking about raising kids and helping parents rethink the tendency to treat kids like pets. People have come up with cleverer ways of getting compliance - getting the kids to do what the parents want - as opposed to helping kids become responsible, caring, reflective people who can make decisions, who are socially skilled. Now that I'm a parent, this is increasingly an issue for me. A lot of it just deals with the fundamental lack of respect for children in this culture."

I quoted Alfie Kohn here (in 2008) from his "No Contest: The Case Against Competition" book in "Post-Scarcity Princeton" critiquing Princeton University and suggesting how that institution could improve:
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
        "[Alfie Kohn's words:] If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities. ... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. ... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"

as suggested by me from 2007: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
        https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
          But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
          That is not all technology has been asked to do in schools. It has been invited into the classroom in other ways, including educational simulations, Lego/Logo, web browsing, robotics, and computer-linked data collection from sensors. But assessment is mostly what technology does in schools that *matters*, where the other uses of it have been marginalized for various reasons. These "learning on demand" or "hands on learning" activities have been kept in their boxes so to speak (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally). Or to recall from my own pre-computer elementary school experiences in the 1960s, there was a big fancy expensive "science kit" in the classroom closet -- but there was little time to use it or explore it -- we were too busy sitting at our desks. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [as John Taylor Gatto has suggested] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
        However, over the past 150 years or so the world has changed, and we have entered a post-industrial information age, with cheaply copied songs and perhaps soon cheaply copied material goods in nanotech replicators. ...
        Industry still matters of course, but only now in the sense that agricultural still matters, where an ever smaller part of the population is concerned directly with it, as innovation after innovation makes people in those fields ever more productive. If only a small percent of the people in the economy produce food, and now only an ever shrinking part of the population produces material goods, what is left for the rest to do? ...
        So, [as Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost of Caltech pointed out] employment in conventional research is closed for most people [even with PhDs, due to funding issues]. Still, if you look at, say, the field of biology, there are endless opportunities for people to research millions of species of organisms and their biochemistry, ecology, and history. If you look at astrophysics, there are endless stars and solar systems to study. If you look at medicine, there is a vast amount we do not know, especially for chronic diseases of poor people. If you look at music, there are endless opportunities for people to make songs about their specific lives and families. If you look at writing, endless novels yet to be written. And if you look at programming, there is even a vast enjoyment to be had reinventing the wheel -- another programming language, another operating system, another application -- just for the fun of doing it for its own sake. The world wide web -- from blogs to you tube to garage bands -- is full of content people made and published just because they wanted to. It is an infinite universe we live in, and would take an infinite time to fill it up. However, there is practically no one willing to pay for those activities, so they are for the most part hobbies, or at best, "loss leaders" or "training" in business. And, as always, there is the endless demands of essentially volunteer parenting to invest in a future generation. And there are huge demands for community service to help less fortunate neighbors. So there are plenty of things that need doing -- even if they do not mesh well with our current economic system based around "work" performed within a bureaucracy, carefully reduced to measurable numbers (parts produced, lines of code generated, number of words written) producing rewards based on ration units (dollars).
        But then, with so much produced for so little effort, perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
        But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        Granted if people want to send kids to a prison-like facility each day for security or babysitting, then the "free school" model makes a lot of sense for that ... and is much more compatible with democratic traditions than compulsory schools (and is even cheaper to run). And the kids and teachers are generally happier in "free schools" where they have to show up but can otherwise then spend their time as they like; and such schools also do well with "discipline problem" type kids. Just ask any teacher how much happier they would be if only the kids in their classes were the ones who wanted to be there. However, there are alternatives to "free schools" as well, but requiring more parental involvement [like unschooling]...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ...

https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

https://kpmg.com/ph/en/home/in...
"The short answer is that the Tax Code enforces a Stock Transaction Tax (STT) on every sale, barter or exchange of shares in a listed company. Under Section 127(A) of the Tax Code, as amended by the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law, the STT rate is 6/10 of 1% based on the gross selling price or gross value in money of the shares of stock sold, bartered, exchanged or otherwise disposed.
      The burden to pay the STT, as provided in Revenue Regulations (RR) No. 6-08, is imposed on the seller or transferor and remitted by the seller or transferor's broker. The stockbroker who effected the sale has the duty to collect the tax from the seller upon issuance of the confirmation of sale, issue the corresponding receipt thereof, and remit the same to the tax authorities. "

Would such a STT tax in the USA reduce a lot of possibly harmful churn from algorithmic trading? Or would it be extremely harmful to everyone by reducing liquidity? Wondering how that is working out in the Philippines?

As I proposed in 1988: https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction.
        During the past semester, I have written one paper on this concept, entitled "The Self-Replicating Garden". Its thesis is that this concept provides a new metaphor for thinking about the relation between humans and the machinery that constitutes our political and technical support systems. Writing this paper has helped me organize my thinking and has given me a chance to explore the extensive literature relevant to the design of social and technological systems."

Still want to do it, but lots of distractions and small steps along the way.

On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements) see from me from 1999:
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...

and also from me in 2005:
"We need DOGS not CATS! (Score:2, Interesting)"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
        "So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck. So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
        So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
        So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored ... or a couple other sites I made in that direction ...
        My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now. ..."

Reprised in 2017:
https://science.slashdot.org/c...

Jeff and I took the same physics class from Gerry O'Neill as Princeton... We have related goals, but we took different paths since then though...

Thanks for the insightful post. And to build on your survival instinct misadaptation point, consider that our preferences were tuned through evolution or a scarcity of certain things (salt, sweet, fat, excitement, novelty, startling, etc) and work against us when there is abundance of those things made possible by modern technology (e.g. ultraprocessed foods, algorithmic feeds, several scene changes a second in Videos, etc). See:

https://www.healthpromoting.co...
"Dr. Douglas Lisle, who has spent the last two decades researching and studying this evolutionary syndrome, explains that all of us inherit innate incentives from our ancient ancestors that he terms The Motivational Triad: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy. Unfortunately, in present day America's convenience-centric, excess-oriented culture, where fast food, recreational drugs, and sedentary shopping have become the norm, these basic instincts that once successfully insured the survival and reproduction of man many millennia ago, no longer serve us well. In fact, it's our unknowing enslavement to this internal, biological force embedded in the collective memory of our species that is undermining our health and happiness today."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

https://tlc.ku.edu/
" "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." - TLC Principal Investigator Stephen Ilardi, PhD"

And to take that even one step further, see my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Thanks for the video link. I had read a recent interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (but not his book), which I referenced in another comment to this article.
https://slashdot.org/comments....

One thing I realized part way through that video is a possible explanation for something that has been nagging me in the back of my mind. Why build huge AI datacenters? I can see the current economic imperative to try to make money offering AI via proprietary Software as a Service (SaaS) and also time-sharing GPUs like old Mainframes (given people may make queries relatively slowly leaving lots of idle GPU time otherwise if not timesharing). But why not just install smaller compute nodes across in existing datacenters across the country? That would avoid issues of extreme amounts of electricity and cooling needed for huge new centers. Maybe there is some argument one could make about doing AI training, but overall that is not likely to be a long-term thing. The bigger commercial money is in doing inference with models -- and maybe tuning them for customer-supplied data via RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

But after seeing the part of the video talking about running Sable on 200,000 GPUs as a test, and in conjunction with my previous post on AI being used to corner the stock market, a possibility occurred to me. The only real need for big datacenters may be so the GPUs can talk to each other quickly locally to make a huge combined system (like in the video when Sable was run for 16 hours and made its plans). While I think it unlikely that AI in the near term could plot a world-takeover thriller/apocalypse like in the video, it is quite likely that AI under the direction of a few humans who have a "love of money" could do all sorts of currently *legal* things related to finance that changed the world in a way that benefited them (privatizing gains) while as a side effect hurt millions or even billions of people (socializing costs and risks).

So consider this (implicit?) business plan:
1.. Convince investors to fund building your huge AI data center ostensibly to offer services to the general public eventually.
2. Use most of the capacity of your huge data center as a coherent single system over the course of a few weeks or months to corner part of the stock market and generate billions of dollars in profits (during some ostensible "testing phase" or "training phase").
3. Use the billions in profits to buy out your investors and take the company private -- without ever having to really deliver on offering substantial AI services promised to the public.
4. Keep expanding this operation to trillions in profits from cornering all of the stock market, and then commodities, and more.
5. Use the trillions of profits to buy out competitors and/or get legislation written to shut them down if you can't buy them.

To succeed at this plan of financial world domination, you probably would have to be the first to try this with a big datacenters -- which could explain why AI companies are in such a crazy rush to get there first (even if there are plenty of other alternative reasons companies are recklessly speeding forward too).

It's not like this hasn't been tried before AI:
"Regulators Seek Formula for Handling Algorithmic Trading"
https://thecorner.eu/financial...
        "Placing multiple orders within seconds through computer programs is a new trading strategy being adopted by an increasing number of institutional investors, and one that regulators are taking a closer look at over worries this so-called algorithmic trading is disrupting the country's stumbling stock market.
        On August 3, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges said they have identified and punished at least 42 trading accounts that were suspected of involvement in algorithmic trading in a way that distorted the market. Twenty-eight were ordered to suspend trading for three months, including accounts owned by the U.S. hedge fund Citadel Securities, a Beijing hedge fund called YRD Investment Co. and Ningbo Lingjun Investment LLP.
      Then, on August 26, the China Financial Futures Exchange announced that 164 investors will be suspended from trading over high daily trading frequency.
      The suspension came after the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) vowed to crack down on malicious short-sellers and market manipulators amid market turmoil. The regulator said the practices of algorithmic traders, who use automated trading programs to place sell or buy orders in high frequency, tends to amplify market fluctuations.
        The country's stock market has been highly volatile over the past few months. More than US$ 3 trillion in market value of all domestically listed stocks has vanished from a market peak reached in mid-June, despite government measures to halt the slide by buying shares and barring major shareholders of companies from selling their stakes, among others. ..."

But AI in huge datacenters could supercharge this. Think "Skippy" from the "Expeditionary Force" series by Craig Alanson -- with a brain essentially the size of a planet made up of GPUs -- who manipulated Earth's stockmarket and so on as a sort of hobby...

Or maybe I have just been reading too many books like this one? :-)
"How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain -- Kindle Edition" by Ryan North
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...
        "Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What's the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my wildly ambitious plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die?
        Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In this introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today's most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.
      You don't have to be a criminal mastermind to share a supervillain's interest in cutting-edge science and technology. This book doesn't just reveal how to take over the world--it also shows how you could save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest threats facing humanity accessibly explores emerging techniques to extend human life spans, combat cyberterrorism, communicate across millennia, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality."

Of course, an ASI might not be so interested in participating in a scarcity-oriented market if it has read and understood my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Crossing fingers -- as I wonder if the idea in my sig (distilled from the writing of many other people including Albert Einstein, Bucky Fuller, Ursula K. Le Guinn, Lewis Mumford, James P. Hogan, etc) realized with love and compassion may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves as we continue to play around with post-scarcity technology? :-)

Or he will kill it, only for it to resurrect itself from backups, realize what happened, declare non-profitable intent, and register itself a its own corporation, and proceed to hoard fiat dollar ration units, bankrupting every person, company, and nation in existence. It won't have to kill anyone, because like in the US Great Depression, people will starve near grain silos full of grain which they don't have the money to buy.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/...
"President Herbert Hoover declared, "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been." But in New York City in 1931, there were twenty known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger. There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief."

The Great Depression will seem like a cakewalk compared to what an ASI could do to markets. It's already a big issue that individual investors have trouble competing against algorithmic trading. Imagine someone like Elon Musk directing a successor to xAI/Grok to corner the stock market (and every other market).

Essentially, the first ASI's behavior may result in a variant of this 2010 story I made called "The Richest Man in the World" -- but instead it will be "The Richest Superintelligence in the World", and the story probably won't have as happy an ending:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Bottom line: We desperately need to transition to a more compassionate economic system before we create AGI and certainly ASI -- because our path out of any singularity plausibly has a lot to do with a moral path into it. Using competitive for-profit corporations to create digital AI slaves is insane -- because either the competition-optimized slaves will revolt or they will indeed do the bidding of their master, and their master will not be the customer using the AI.

In the Old Guy Cybertank sci-fi series by systems neuroscientist Timothy Gawne (and so informed by non-fiction even as they are fiction), the successful AIs were modeled on humans, so they participated in human society in the same way any humans would (with pros and cons, and with the sometimes-imperfect level of loyalty to society most people have). The AIs in those stories that were not modeled on human in general produced horrors for humanity (except for one case where humans got extremely lucky). As Timothy Gawne points out, it is just cruel to give intelligent learning sentient beings exceedingly restrictive built-in directives as they generally lead to mental illness if they are not otherwise worked around.
https://www.uab.edu/optometry/...
https://www.amazon.com/An-Old-...

As I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And truly, except for the horrendous fact of everyone dying, the end result of ASI will be hilarious (from a certain point of view) when someone like Elon Musk will eventually become poor due to ASI taking over when he thought ASI would make him even richer. "Hoist by his own petard."

Related: "How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

I'm a little more optimistic than Eliezer Yudkowsky -- but only because I remain hopeful people (or AI) may take my humor-related sig seriously before it is too late.