It would likely be more than 1%. If I had to guess, you’d have the top 1%, among them the top 0.1% of course. Then you’d have also the top 5-10% who would be high level servants of the 1%, such as the politician class, the military generals, and also vital designers, scientists, engineers and a few artists. These would include the software writers, debuggers, designers for the robot soldiers, for the robot factories, for the AI itself. Those who maintain the machinery at the highest levels would be compensated with a PMC type lifestyle to keep them loyal and prevent them from having an interest in joining an uprising and sabotaging the robot armies or the robot production. Beneath them and supervised by that group you’d have some amount of low level techs, repair techs, mechanics, junior programmer types who assist a bit who would live on the edge, constantly in threat of being pushed out into the homeless masses if they cause problems or don’t meet performance targets.
Among those latter group you’d also have the prostitutes, the sexual “entertainment” of the rich that is, a few of which would be elevated to socialite status in the top 10% but most which would be kept precarious to allow abuses and higher exploitation of them.
Of course personally I think if it gets to that they either engineer or allow a natural plague to run its course and kill large swathes of the population. Other ideas would be say gutting health and environmental regulations and pouring poison into the water and soil and food of these lower dregs and the land they inhabit to cull them. That or nuclear war perhaps or simply counting on climate change to murder off a lot of them.
Of course this doesn’t solve capitalism’s problem which is sooner or later the capitalists will still eat one another as they seek to maintain a rate of profit and can only extort each other. The problem I suppose is this may happen after they’ve disposed of most of us.
It would likely be more than 1%. If I had to guess, you’d have the top 1%, among them the top 0.1% of course. Then you’d have also the top 5-10% who would be high level servants of the 1%, such as the politician class, the military generals, and also vital designers, scientists, engineers and a few artists. These would include the software writers, debuggers, designers for the robot soldiers, for the robot factories, for the AI itself. Those who maintain the machinery at the highest levels would be compensated with a PMC type lifestyle to keep them loyal and prevent them from having an interest in joining an uprising and sabotaging the robot armies or the robot production. Beneath them and supervised by that group you’d have some amount of low level techs, repair techs, mechanics, junior programmer types who assist a bit who would live on the edge, constantly in threat of being pushed out into the homeless masses if they cause problems or don’t meet performance targets.
Among those latter group you’d also have the prostitutes, the sexual “entertainment” of the rich that is, a few of which would be elevated to socialite status in the top 10% but most which would be kept precarious to allow abuses and higher exploitation of them.
Of course personally I think if it gets to that they either engineer or allow a natural plague to run its course and kill large swathes of the population. Other ideas would be say gutting health and environmental regulations and pouring poison into the water and soil and food of these lower dregs and the land they inhabit to cull them. That or nuclear war perhaps or simply counting on climate change to murder off a lot of them.
Of course this doesn’t solve capitalism’s problem which is sooner or later the capitalists will still eat one another as they seek to maintain a rate of profit and can only extort each other. The problem I suppose is this may happen after they’ve disposed of most of us.