[mockingbirdy]

> There's a breaking point of widespread democratized (runnable by like 1-5 people, or a small community) technology where these companies don't have the same ability to absorb all these gains

That is actually a technological solution for a societal problem that I see as a way out:

A device that produces food, water, energy and does sanitation for a family of 4-5 people. This device would make it possible to give families higher leverage in any negotiation because they can not be forced to work for survival. We have the tech, only limiting factor is the size, but we will find a way.

- Solar Foods [1] (Protein production with CO2 and solar energy with a fermentation process)

- Omni Processor which recycles human waste [2]

- Tiger Toilet [3]

- Low cost waste water treatment [4]

- And potato production in a small vertical setup

[1]: https://solarfoods.com

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tdlqjGlN3A

[3]: http://www.easol.in/tiger-toilet-overivew

[4]: https://www.tbfenvironmental.in

[dogcomplex]

Yep, exactly. I hope and expect to see automated vertical farm systems as cheap consumer products soon enough, for one. Though I also don't think we necessarily need to reinvent the wheel with this stuff - it doesn't have to be some independent micro system (which are typically much less convenient than mass-produced systems). We can still use standard farming/water/energy-production/sanitation - we just need to reduce the bottom-line cost of those services (which I am still strongly betting AI will impact hard) and make it so creating a competing system takes much less capital to boot up, in case existing services decide they want to try and charge the same consumer prices while eating up all the efficiency gains from AI.

We don't need to settle for lower quality, or convenience. We just need to ensure capitalism does what it's supposed to, and pass on the efficiency gains down to the consumer.

Though also, for my money - water, energy, sanitation? Those are already very cheap, and will get cheaper naturally. And food is cheap if you keep to basics. Automated housing construction and automated high-quality-meal kitchens (not just basics) seem like the areas to tackle for real cost savings. Ultimately the last bastion will be rent seeking on land though - which could be alleviated by creating housing alternatives off the conventional grid, or uplifting the quality of services in much of the developing world so there are much more options of safe areas to live (which again, is happening fast already and will happen much faster with a rapid improvement from AI tooling).

My argument is this is the natural way capitalism works - or is supposed to work - and we should treat that with hearty skepticism. But the only way this doesn't happen seems to be if there are monopolistic forces actively holding it back. Otherwise there really should be an abundance of cheap options for living coming to consumers in the near future, which would effectively be close to a UBI, and a "living off the land" alternative to wage labor.

(P.S. for housing, my bets are more on modular housing production in a factory setting becoming highly automated - the quality level of those builds is already quite high. But also just automation on the materials production all the way down the stack. There's hope for in-place construction savings (robots!) but I think that'll come much later. Logistics transportation was already due for some major improvements before AI reared its head - cheap electric engines just enable some very different structures that effectively have a net-0 cost of operation when combined with solar. Any innovation on that front would dramatically reduce the cost of everything else.

Dark kitchens are already a thing, and expect them to keep growing - especially as the tools improve. You could probably supply a whole city with the same wide variety of well-cooked dishes from a single facility with efficient transport. There's an element of dystopia there as cook jobs disappear and thus the personal touch, but the consumer reality (should be) basically-free meals at the same quality we expect from restaurants, on demand.)