There are lots of problems with creating a welfare state, including the fact that there are already millions of un or underemployed people in the world, who are desperately trying to emigrate to the wealthy countries like the US and Europe. I know, because I was one of them:-) As we've seen from our failed wars on drugs, crime and immigration, these trends are impossible to stop.
One solution to this problem is: birth control! Too many people, not enough jobs, and cheap automated production of pharmaceuticals? The solution is obvious:-) No doubt the wealthy elite will catch on to this possibility; we may even witness the irony of Big Pharma trying to undermine some patents in that area to make sure that all those poor folk who can't afford the expensive longevity drugs have an endless supply of free birth control pills. More draconian schemes are not difficult to conjure up.
My new ultimate solution for all our problems is cheap space flight! We need to get off this damn planet fast, because it's clearly getting too small for our grand experiments. I haven't done the math, but it seems almost axiomatic that it's not possible to blast enough people into space to make a dent into an exponentially growing population, even with cheap robot labor cranking out lots of space planes. However, a combination of aggressive birth control and aggressive emigration into the solar system would seem like a plausible solution. The beauty of this approach is that people can experiment with all sorts of new socio-economic models on Mars, the Moon or in orbit, without jeopardizing the entire world economy or indeed the survival of the Earth's natural ecosystems in the process. Ultimately this would be the only form of "true" freedom that would be sustainable, because it seems that any political entity that lives long enough eventually contracts bureaucratic cancer or something like that. To truly implement Jefferson's notion of frequent revolution, you need to be able to distance yourself in space from the status quo, exactly as the founding Americans were able to distance themselves from their British forebears. Without that, we're doomed, because those with power and money will naturally be driven to retain it all cost!
Of course getting there would require an unprecedented amount of vision and leadership, not to mention incredible skill at managing the myriad technical, social and economic obstacles in our way. Extinction is however the only alternative: forget robots, space rocks, genocide or nukes; Yellowstone is a huge super-volcano and it's about due for another eruption! We're an incredibly successful but fragile species, and it wouldn't take much to wipe us out; there is some evidence that an earlier super-volcano almost did: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/evolution/.
Another option is to go the Voyager route, and blast the robots into the galaxy to spread our legacy and little bit of hard-won knowledge we've accumulated over our brief lifespan as a species. This has many advantages, including the fact that it's potentially easier to build self-reproducing space-faring robots than to build interstellar space craft that can sustain humans for thousands of years (not to mention the political difficulties the inhabitants would encounter with each other, unless they were all continuously drugged, or perhaps in embryonic form).
Who knows? We or our descendants will either figure it out, or vanish without a trace. In the mean time we get to agonize over our own demise. Such is the tragic destiny of being sentient (as opposed to being too dumb to care).
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There are lots of problems with creating a welfare state, including the fact that there are already millions of un or underemployed people in the world, who are desperately trying to emigrate to the wealthy countries like the US and Europe. I know, because I was one of them :-) As we've seen from our failed wars on drugs, crime and immigration, these trends are impossible to stop.
:-) No doubt the wealthy elite will catch on to this possibility; we may even witness the irony of Big Pharma trying to undermine some patents in that area to make sure that all those poor folk who can't afford the expensive longevity drugs have an endless supply of free birth control pills. More draconian schemes are not difficult to conjure up.
One solution to this problem is: birth control! Too many people, not enough jobs, and cheap automated production of pharmaceuticals? The solution is obvious
My new ultimate solution for all our problems is cheap space flight! We need to get off this damn planet fast, because it's clearly getting too small for our grand experiments. I haven't done the math, but it seems almost axiomatic that it's not possible to blast enough people into space to make a dent into an exponentially growing population, even with cheap robot labor cranking out lots of space planes. However, a combination of aggressive birth control and aggressive emigration into the solar system would seem like a plausible solution. The beauty of this approach is that people can experiment with all sorts of new socio-economic models on Mars, the Moon or in orbit, without jeopardizing the entire world economy or indeed the survival of the Earth's natural ecosystems in the process. Ultimately this would be the only form of "true" freedom that would be sustainable, because it seems that any political entity that lives long enough eventually contracts bureaucratic cancer or something like that. To truly implement Jefferson's notion of frequent revolution, you need to be able to distance yourself in space from the status quo, exactly as the founding Americans were able to distance themselves from their British forebears. Without that, we're doomed, because those with power and money will naturally be driven to retain it all cost!
Of course getting there would require an unprecedented amount of vision and leadership, not to mention incredible skill at managing the myriad technical, social and economic obstacles in our way. Extinction is however the only alternative: forget robots, space rocks, genocide or nukes; Yellowstone is a huge super-volcano and it's about due for another eruption! We're an incredibly successful but fragile species, and it wouldn't take much to wipe us out; there is some evidence that an earlier super-volcano almost did: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/evolution/.
Another option is to go the Voyager route, and blast the robots into the galaxy to spread our legacy and little bit of hard-won knowledge we've accumulated over our brief lifespan as a species. This has many advantages, including the fact that it's potentially easier to build self-reproducing space-faring robots than to build interstellar space craft that can sustain humans for thousands of years (not to mention the political difficulties the inhabitants would encounter with each other, unless they were all continuously drugged, or perhaps in embryonic form).
Who knows? We or our descendants will either figure it out, or vanish without a trace. In the mean time we get to agonize over our own demise. Such is the tragic destiny of being sentient (as opposed to being too dumb to care).