Martin,
I hate to seem rude about you or your book, which I must commend you for for going to the time and trouble of writing and publishing, but it seems that the thesis presented is contradicted by a simple piece of economics.
To see the mistake, look at this paragraph summarizing the chapter on "Make Work Bias" from The Myth of the Rational Voter
Make-work bias
Caplan refers to the make-work bias as a “tendency to underestimate the economic benefits from conserving labor.” (p40) People tend to equate economic growth with job creation, even if those jobs are wasteful or outright detrimental to growth. Economists argue that this is precisely wrong: growth comes from increases in the productivity of labor. The resulting increase in productivity, ceteris paribus, causes people to be dismissed from existing jobs and encourages them to seek more socially valuable opportunities. Caplan makes special emphasis of the movement away from farming over the past two hundred years—from 95% of Americans as farmers to just 3%—as an illustrative example. Those millions who are no longer farming can be employed to make iPods, maintain communication networks, and run restaurants
Just because the average consumer is unemployed doesn't mean he has no income. For example, he might own shares in robot companies that pay a big dividend. Why would they pay a big dividend? Because, by assumption, the robot company makes extremely useful products. The person might also get a government handout, which would be financed by heavy government taxes on these extremely productive robot/AI companies.
Furthermore, just because Robots and AI-systems can do all of the pragmatically necessary work, it doesn't follow that no-one will want a human to do something. For example, you might want a real human musician rather than a robot, etc.
In this happy state of affairs, people would probably cease to be motivated by money, and instead be motivated in part by pursuit of other scarce resources, such as the time of people who had rare and desirable traits, or by "making a difference to the world"-type considerations. Though I suspect that most of the motivation would come from just wanting to go and have a good time. Drinks are served, time to party, etc.
Re: "Just because the average consumer is unemployed doesn't mean he has no income. For example, he might own shares in robot companies that pay a big dividend. Why would they pay a big dividend? Because, by assumption, the robot company makes extremely useful products."
Most depend for their income on revenue from work - or government handouts. Few can live for long off interest on their savings. Increased production levels in the future are unlikely to make all that much difference to that situation. Martin makes a broadly similar point here...
The question that the ideas are supposed to be in response to is:
Here are links to some proposed ideas that you should vote for, assuming you agree with them. You do have to register to vote, but the email confirmation arrives right away and it shouldn't take much more than two minutes of your time altogether. Why should you do this? The top voted ideas from this request for ideas will be seen by some of the top policy recommendation makers in the USA. They probably won't do anything like immediately convene a presidential panel on AGI, but we are letting them know that these things are really important.
Research the primary cause of degenerative diseases: aging / biological senescence
Explore proposals for sustaining the economy despite ubiquitous automation
Establish a Permanent Panel or Program to Address Global Catastrophic Risks, Including AGI
Does anyone have any other ideas? Feel free to submit them directly to ideascale, but it may be a better idea to first post them in the comments of this post for discussion.