The thing I am struggling with is that many of the failed rentier states you mention were poor or lacking institutional organization prior to the discovery of the resource that enriched them. It seems much easier to keep people poor than to strip them of their previous income without mass social unrest, just as it's easier to not build a school than it is to tell a generation they can't attend a previously existing school since they have no productive future. If these future AI systems yield such massive rents, there could be an incentive to provide the ma... (read more)
The thing I am struggling with is that many of the failed rentier states you mention were poor or lacking institutional organization prior to the discovery of the resource that enriched them. It seems much easier to keep people poor than to strip them of their previous income without mass social unrest, just as it's easier to not build a school than it is to tell a generation they can't attend a previously existing school since they have no productive future. If these future AI systems yield such massive rents, there could be an incentive to provide the ma... (read more)