I would say your description of a world where most people are left to “shut the fuck up and enjoy your government handouts or freemium robot butlers or whatever” while the few elites are uploading their consciousness and living in unimaginable luxury is a post-scarcity vision, and it’s a fine one. Inequality is only an issue insofar as it includes suffering and poverty. If 1% of the people have 99% of the wealth and status, but they make sure us plebeians all have plenty of food, water, housing, and free time and access to all the tools and supplies within reason we could ask for for our hobbies and recreational pursuits, if for no other reason than to keep us from rioting, that’s as damn near a utopia as I can ever imagine human beings building.
Your whole argument rests on an assumption I think is false—that a person’s sense of “meaning” in their life must include a sense of significance within the global context. That is an incredibly recent development, and I think in this scenario it would go away as fast as it came and no one will miss it. You can have plenty of meaning and significance, and plenty of existing and competition within our all-important web of weird overlapping status hierarchies, within your smaller social circles of family and friends and localized networks. That’s how it has been for most of human history. We all collectively got to pretend that we all had a significant place in a great global status and relationship network for a while after we all got interconnected by the industrial and information revolutions, but if the post-scarcity world takes that illusion away, we’ll be just fine, maybe even a little better off. I see no reason to think that in this vision of a post-scarcity world most people couldn’t find plenty of ways to fill their lives with meaning and happiness derived from socializing with friends and family, and pursuing hobbies and artistic pursuits. You could still even have an opt-in economy based on luxuries and access to unique artisan products or experiences or personal human interactions and services, which people could participate in as much or as little as they pleased. You seem to assume that the fact that we would all know there were a handful of elites out there wielding unimaginable power and engaging with the singularity in ways we could never dream of having access to would somehow take the meaning and purpose out of the rest of our lives. I don’t believe that’s true.
I would say your description of a world where most people are left to “shut the fuck up and enjoy your government handouts or freemium robot butlers or whatever” while the few elites are uploading their consciousness and living in unimaginable luxury is a post-scarcity vision, and it’s a fine one. Inequality is only an issue insofar as it includes suffering and poverty. If 1% of the people have 99% of the wealth and status, but they make sure us plebeians all have plenty of food, water, housing, and free time and access to all the tools and supplies within reason we could ask for for our hobbies and recreational pursuits, if for no other reason than to keep us from rioting, that’s as damn near a utopia as I can ever imagine human beings building.
Your whole argument rests on an assumption I think is false—that a person’s sense of “meaning” in their life must include a sense of significance within the global context. That is an incredibly recent development, and I think in this scenario it would go away as fast as it came and no one will miss it. You can have plenty of meaning and significance, and plenty of existing and competition within our all-important web of weird overlapping status hierarchies, within your smaller social circles of family and friends and localized networks. That’s how it has been for most of human history. We all collectively got to pretend that we all had a significant place in a great global status and relationship network for a while after we all got interconnected by the industrial and information revolutions, but if the post-scarcity world takes that illusion away, we’ll be just fine, maybe even a little better off. I see no reason to think that in this vision of a post-scarcity world most people couldn’t find plenty of ways to fill their lives with meaning and happiness derived from socializing with friends and family, and pursuing hobbies and artistic pursuits. You could still even have an opt-in economy based on luxuries and access to unique artisan products or experiences or personal human interactions and services, which people could participate in as much or as little as they pleased. You seem to assume that the fact that we would all know there were a handful of elites out there wielding unimaginable power and engaging with the singularity in ways we could never dream of having access to would somehow take the meaning and purpose out of the rest of our lives. I don’t believe that’s true.