I've thought about this abit, and haven't come up with a complete answer. But, if we look at what happened to the music industry, and whats happening to hollywood now. Music is basically free in this day and age, with the internet you can sign up for a service, pay a monthly fee and boom unlimited music. Same with television, and books. Beset with piracy, the market adapted. No one was going to continue paying retail prices for albums, and movies, and books when they could download it for free with zero risk of getting caught.
So we got all inclusive services offered at a reasonably low monthly fee. When the time comes, and power and food are so cheap to produce I don't see why they can't be provided as an inclusive service offered at a reasonably low fee.
As far as income, only a few parts of the world are developed. The rest of it is just waiting for their turn, Capitalism relies on someone providing the capital for said developing. The upper 1 percent are largely in their position because their forefathers provided the Capital for the US during our own development. I don't see a reason every American citizen can't use their own modest income to invest in the development of other nations, and build an generational lifetime income, become the 1 percent to the rest of the world. At our rate of technological development, you would also factor in the monetization of Space. Lot of resources out their, lots of investment opportunities.
I see automation more as a chance for everyone to embrace capitalism, and become venture capitalists in their own right. That's the beauty of capitalism, labor is a resource, it's success is not dependent on who provides the resource. When machines are providing it, that frees the humans up who used to do something else. There isn't anything stopping them from investing capital of their own in a developing area.
For instance, a man drives truck most of his life. He loses his job to automation. What's to stop him from taking the money he's earned driving his whole life and buying all the old obsolete trucks and starting a trucking company in a place with no domestic shipping at all. Let alone an automated system. Making domestic shipping available, lets a region expand its markets, grow its economy, and many other things. This guy could become the Schneider of Honduras. Fast forward, as more people lose their jobs to automation and deal in capital themselves, the wage income will disappear replaced by an income derived from capital gains. And once we get to space, we will never run out of things to develop. Because A) with all this free time we will **** like bunnies and our population will move past what the earth can sustain. And B) we can't help but explore **** no matter how dangerous it is. We are going to go there, and probably poke it with a stick.
