Government is also reliant on its citizens to not violently protest, which would happen if it got to the point you describe.

The idealist in me hopes that eventually those with massive gains in productivity/wealth from automating everything would want to start doing things for the good of humanity™, right? 
...Hopefully that point is long before large scale starvation.

Unfortunately, when dealing with tasks such as software development it is nowhere near as linear as that. 

The meta-tasks of each additional dev needing to be brought up to speed on the intricacies of the project, as well as lost efficiency from poor communication/waiting on others to finish things means you usually get diminishing (or even inverse) returns from adding more people to the project.
See: The Mythical Man Month

I would love to see it happen. It'd be nice to have more stuff in the air removing Co2 and absorbing sunlight. 
I'm curious, what got you thinking of floating algae?

I would estimate the relative difficulty of
[colonizing Himalayan mountain slopes vs free-floating (pelagic?) life at a similar altitude] to that of
[adapting to the salinity of the Great Salt Lake, vs that of the Dead Sea]. The former can support brine shrimp and microorganisms, the latter only microorganisms. Equivalently, the slopes can support simple multicellular life on down, while in the atmosphere we've found bacteria and little else so far.

We know there are particular points at which it is ~impossible for life as we know it to survive e.g. inside the sun, but less extreme absolute lines seem to tempt evolution.

I wonder if sufficient intelligence could distill a formula for estimating likelihood of life adapting to arbitrary parameters in a particular time frame?
Like: "given certain resources and conditions, viable adaptations might form in x [millon/billion] years."^[1]
Then it would simply be a question of "will these conditions last long enough for the adaptation to happen with a high probability?"

1. ^{^}

   But then again, would that require it to brute-force simulate ~all possible mutations for a certain number of steps? And at what point is the simulated life behaviorally indistinguishable from the physical?
   Obviously I'm out of my depth and far from my expertise here but it sure is fun to speculate

While I cannot say that such an organism is impossible, here are a couple obstacles that it would need to overcome:

• Sparse nutrient availability - In the ocean, phytoplankton growth is primarily gated by the available nutrients in the water column (particularly phosphates, nitrates and iron compounds, in addition to oxygen iirc). Air has significantly less capacity to transport nutrients compared to how nutrients in the ocean can be both dissolved in water and present in particulate matter.
• Sub-optimal temperatures - Even at the equator, the atmospheric temperature rapidly drops with altitude, with averages quickly falling below those favorable to most algae.
• What biological mechanism would it use for efficiently staying permanently aloft?
  
  ...Aww hell. Am I starting to write like an LLM or do LLMs these days write like me?
  
  Spanish moss is able to scavenge sufficient nutrients from the air/water without needing direct contact with soil, but it is also useful to note that the water it gets is able to dissolve more nutrients as it comes in contact with tree branches and airborne particles, which are more abundant closer to the ground. I predict it would struggle to do the same even one or two kilometers higher, even if it was warm enough up there (it's not).
  
  It is also notable that many species of algae and moss do use airborne spores to successfully spread themselves around the planet. Spores are typically dormant until certain conditions are met & I do not know of any that grow and actively metabolize while airborne^[1].
  If air, rain, and light were the sole factors at play I would expect to see more things like Spanish moss growing from the ledges of lofty skyscrapers.
  Though a few niche plants have adapted to extremes in elevation and temperature they are the exception rather than the rule and are far less numerous than their more down-to-earth counterparts.
  
  TL;DR: While it is technically possible for highly specialized plants to survive in some of these conditions, it is an unforgiving environment that is less favorable for photosynthetic life.
  Rather than the proverbial low-hanging fruit left untouched, the high-floating fruit has been tasted and found rather cold and bitter for most tastes.
   

I am not an expert, but I have a general familiarity with algae and plant life cycles.

1. ^{^}

   I would love to be wrong here, if they did exist I would still expect them to fly over the radar for a while before humans look closely enough to discover them

Another useful heuristic is that electrical devices that have been UL listed^[1] are typically better quality than ones without. This is particularly relevant for cheap/disposable items like light bulbs where the cheapest ones tend to expire long before the expected lifetime of the actual LED. (I'm looking at you 'bargain' Walmart LEDs that died after less than a year of regular use!)

Note that UL is a for-profit organization. I have never heard anything bad about it but perverse incentives could create conflicts of interest in any number of ways in the future. I hope there is someone monitoring that sort of thing.

1. ^{^}

   Or other organizations that test for standards of quality and/or safety

I may have distracted from the point by using the race field as my example, my point was primarily to show how deviating from controlled terminology is a waste of time and money.

Allowing more possible choices is not always better in clinical trials. The more data you have, the more degrees of freedom you have in the data and the more spurious correlations you are going to pick up.

Controlled terminology outline what standard terms are available to be used for a particular field. Studies are not required to put all available terms in the dropdown. For instance, there are 100+ entries in the controlled terminology for "UNIT". Usually one only needs to make available the ones applicable to whatever is being measured rather than all the allowed options.

In some regards my perspective was biased here by being exclusively focused on quantitative analysis.

Vestigial products and policies also tend to have an 'immune response', generated when parties who benefit^[1] from the status quo actively resist attempts to change it. For example violin bow manufacturers could hypothetically fear lower sales if synthetic bows captured a greater market share, due to them not needing to be replaced as frequently.

1. ^{^}

   or even believe they benefit

A couple minor edit suggestions:
Footnote [1] seems to have a missed "opportunity" after "every" in:

 I can't help but notice people using these terms at every, no matter

To me, an individual's own inability to notice an exceedingly clear absence of any foundational body of knowledge behind anyone's particular persuasion tactics is much more representative of that particular individual's level of understanding with regards to persuasion itself.

To put it bluntly, this statement feels like several related sentences were put into a hydraulic press and this was the result. Perhaps rephrase into multiple component sentences? Fewer words does not necessarily make something easier to parse.

This seems like a useful and accurate overview of the general state of data utilization in many organizations.

In my work as a software engineer at a clinical research company, I'm frequently able to watch as my coworkers struggle to convince our clients (companies running clinical trials) that yes, it is critical to make sure all of available data entry options are locked to industry standardized terms FROM THE BEGINNING else they will be adding thousands of hours of data cleaning on the tail end of the study.

An example of an obstacle to this: Clinicians running/designing the trials are sometimes adamant that we include an option in the field for "Reason for treatment discontinuation" called "Investigator Decision" when that is not an available term in the standard list and the correct standardized code item is "Physician Decision". But they are convinced that the difference matters even though on the back end the people doing the data cleaning are required to match it with the acceptable coded terms and it'll get mapped to "Physician Decision" either way because the FDA only accepts applications that adhere to the standards.
In my opinion a common cause of this disconnect is those running trials are usually quite ignorant of what the process of data cleaning and analysis looks like and they have never been recipients of their own data.

As a pipe dream I would be in favor of mandatory data science courses for all medical professionals before letting them participate in any sort of research, but realistically that would only add regulatory burden while accomplishing little good as there's no practical way to guarantee they actually retain or make use of that knowledge.
 

literally, he did not believe in probabilities between zero and one. yes, such people exist. he would say things like “either it is, or it isn’t” and didn’t buy it when we tried to explain that a 90% chance and a 10% chance are both uncertain but you should treat them differently.

...How does someone this idiotic ever stay in a position of authority? I would get their statements on statistics and probability in writing and show it to the nearest person-with-ability-to-fire-them-who-is-not-also-a-moron.

Strange variant of Monte Hall problem I managed to confuse myself with:
You are presented with the three doors but do not know if you will have a chance to switch later. You know the host can decide to open one of the losing doors and give you the opportunity to switch or not, and does not wish to give away the prize.

If the player chooses the correct door first he is incentivized to open one and give you the option to switch, but since the player is informed of the rules that may convince the player not to switch.
If the player chooses an incorrect door first he disincentivized to give you the option to switch, but since the player is informed of the rules that may convince the player not to switch.
After the host informs you if do you or do not have the option to switch, you are given a piece of paper and asked to predict what is behind the door. If your prediction is correct you get what is behind the door. If your prediction is wrong && [a door was opened] you get what is behind the other one, If prediction is wrong && [no door was opened] you get what is behind one of the remaining doors at random.

Is there an optimal strategy: For the host? For the player?
My working memory is now shot and I can't say I'm confident the puzzle is logically coherent, but it was fun to make.