Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"<p>The answer is that everyone is going to own different robots. The whole point is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that could create enough economic production for his whole life.<p>There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks.<p>I used to worry about robots a lot more, but I don't really anymore. The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things.<p>The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI. I can't predict its motivations.<p>Edit: You guys fundamentally don't get it because you don't understand that I'm arguing about <i>economics</i>.<p>> This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.<p>People are going to, at the very least, own their own means of production. Look at it from an economics standpoint, at the margin, why would I buy a chair rather than get my semi-intelligent android robot to cut down a tree, plank it, and build it. The chair would have to be essentially free. Then who cares who owns the means to production. At the margin I could always revert to having my personal robot build it.<p>Furthermore, I would argue that most of the computers that make most of the value in the world are owned largely by everybody. I have a computer that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on, and it will be the same with robots. People with vision will direct machines of greater sophistication towards and end they desire.<p>Whether you own something or rent it is always going to be a economic decision. I own my Macbook Pro and I installed Ubuntu on it, but even if I was renting it, that doesn't change the fundamental nature of what I'm saying.<p>I used to think that we were marching towards this awful grey future where 99.9% of people were going to be treated like cattle and ultra-corps were going to be running the world with all their machines. Most people talk like this is what's coming, and, barring AI, I no long think this is the case.<p>Edit2: I wrote my first edit when I had negative points, now it seems to have positive points, which is why I opened up the edit with "you guys don't get it".