Project this forward another several thousand years and people will be laughing at us:
- You had to call up people and were limited by the speed of light?
- You didn't have teleportation?
- You lived <100 years and died due to cancer?
- You were still asking "WTF is gravity"?
- You hadn't had the +2 spacial and +1 time dimensional implants in you yet?
- You hadn't adopted the metric system yet?
And so on...
So will the number of people.
The point of "post-scarcity" isn't that there are infinite resources; it's that there are more than the people need.
Everything else is subjective. Either you define "needs" to be objective and thus you can satisfy them with just those things or you can talk about them as "wants". It's just semantics.
We pretty much have all objective needs satisfied. That shouldn't stop anybody to persue their "wants".
While I wouldn't say it's "settled science", it's a fairly well-studied area, and we don't have to just throw up our hands and say it's either bare-bones survival or anything anyone could possibly ask for.
People work to create things... at this point there is a shared duopoly between humans and machines on creating things (in the past animals used to be heavily involved in this labor, and no longer are). Now think what happens if humans are not needed, especially in mass, to create things.
Right now if you're rich you need other humans to dig up coal or make solar panels so you can produce things and sell them to make the yacht you want. But what would happen if you no longer needed the middle part and all those humans that want rights and homes and such in the middle? They would not longer be a means, but a liability. Price no longer is a consideration, human capital is no longer a consideration, control of energy, resources, and compute now is.
You are saying that the rest of the population will starve to death because the AI rich won't given them jobs. They won't build their houses etc.
But guess what? In a free market the AI poor can still trade and work as they always did. It doesn't matter if the AI rich build and exchange yachts and other luxury goods between them.
What you have now is a two tier economy, but not one where people are starving.
This is also the worst case scenario which I don't think it's going to happen as AIs systems are proving quite easy to replicate and most algorithms are open-source (and training data is available publicly).
> and the corporations and governments that control them rapidly have millions of useless mouths to feed?
I always struggle to understand this. Maybe I'm missing something. Who's buying what AIs produce if nobody has an income? You can imagine a scenario where corporations only trade between them (so only shareholder benefit from the production). However in such a scenario who prevents other people from spawning their AI systems?
I also doubt shareholders can actually consume all the GDP by their own. If production is so high that they can't and other people are poorer, then prices must come down. This combined with the fact that you can use your AI to produce services, makes me skeptical of these claims.