spitballing: median US household net worth is $192k. median spending is $75k. at consistent 20% real SPY growth (around 4 year doubling) you plausibly have a safe withdrawal rate of 12-14% instead of 4%. that means you only need ~$500-600k to support your spending. and it only takes 5-6 years of growth (not even any new savings) to get there.

so... if ai-driven economic growth is explosive enough / really transitions to a new regime as capital can be transmuted into labor on demand, there's actually a pretty wide margin for a huge fraction of normal americans to retire comfortably and quickly. and plausibly that transition period has enough demand for physical labor / dataset collection / datacenter buildout that income isn't impossible to come by + people below median have time to build up capital

this rests on historically truly insane sustained economic growth assumptions, but given what we're talking about is a total restructuring of the limiting factors of growth and that's what's causing the risk of unemployment in the first place, that doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.

generally it would mean "UBI" is significantly less necessary and jobs programs / worry about employment structure is significantly less necessary. meaning crisis might still be on, questions about inequality and what the hell the economy looks like are still there, but plausibly we're actually starting from baselines where very large fractions of humans become post-economic very quickly rather than "top 1%". figuring out safety nets for the bottom 30% of america is a much much smaller problem, we pretty much already have those in place.

this is all very fuzzy, pretty sure the NW figure includes home equity and it's very unclear how real estate will be affected, inflation will be super strange w different goods and services probably dramatically varying in value (eg without medtech robots maybe like nearly all diagnostic and prescriptive care is almost free and huge swaths of disease are cured or preventable w cheap new drugs, but surgeries are 10x *more* expensive ?), 20% sustained is both historically very high and obviously sort of ridiculously low in closer to takeoff scenarios so the variance is likely insane, etc etc. not really meant as a prediction.

mainly i'm just noticing: safe withdrawal rates go up significantly if returns structurally + permanently go up, so you need *less capital*. and most of the job loss we discuss is pretty much predicated on returns going up. to the degree returns go up less or more slowly... probably job loss also goes up less or more slowly. so maybe that all leaves us in a better default position that it currently seems?