Jobs and Automation

[Spooner]

One of the most significant trends of technology is the increasing complexity that it brings to society and the removal of a sense of autonomy from the general populace. As the world becomes more complex, fewer and fewer people feel as if they have a meaningful role in their environment. This results in a larger and larger portion of the populace who are "structurally alientated." You already see this at work with tribal communities who are displaced, disrupted, or alienated by the arrival of technology. Their culture, religion, language, customs, and even biology have been finely tuned to their way of life. Along comes technology and makes everything they have been doing seem trivial. It nullifies their sense of purpose by removing the relevance of their behavior toward survival. The same problem can be seen in inner city communities who have few real survival struggle (free food and free lodging is readily available) but do struggle to find a sense of control and purpose. They are surrounded by an environment increasing in complexity at a exponential rate and they have been left behind.

It's a problem not easily solved. Technology demands high competence and higher specialization. Increasingly it's difficult to be involved in technology development unless you're so adapted to a certain way of thinking that you are considered boarderline mentally defective (autism spectrum). Whereas before the alienated were marginal or from marginal groups (minorities, native populations etc) now more and more the alienated are the mainstream. Technology is making the average human irrelevant to the survival and continuation of society.

There are (3) options that I see.
(1) Accept that humans will become a pet class to the technological elite and eventually to the AIs themselves. Try to make this pet life as happy as possible. Inevitably humans that survive will become pet-like. Those who seek too much autonomy will become depressed and select themselves out.
(2) Re-invent human society by returning to tribal and radical localism. Since survival problems are largely solved, use the free time to develop meaningful connections that are not rooted in survival problems. This too will result in a change of humanity. Only some humans will be able to let go of survival problem and accept non-fear based existence rooted in creativity.
(3) engineer humanity themselves to be better suited to increasingly complex life. Risk losing our humanity and merging with the machines we created.

I'd prefer (2) but I don't expect many will be able to actually overcome the obstacles.