content: Why demonize it as "Western" though? China is somehow better? The aboriginals? Africa? Islam?  Oh, I didn't mean to imply anyone else is gonna be better off, just that our current model of "everyone must earn their own way" won't work because we're about to be permanently outclassed and out-competed by machines.  unless you're talking about a completely unrealistic Luddite destruction of the machines  The Luddite approach of protecting busywork to give people something to do just doesn't work, because of its inherent economic disadvantage compared to just doing things efficiently. And we don't want that anyway - nobody really wants to spend their life grubbing around in a rice paddy or chipping away at a coal face. The whole point of machines is to make free stuff for humans.  So what do you propose?  How's this for a possible solution (just making shit up as I go along): Corporate investment into supporting the general public, basic-income-style, as an investment into producing future high-value individuals? A company would sponsor a village to some minimum quality-of-life level, in exchange for which that company gets dibs on employing those rare geniuses produced by that village who still have the potential to outperform the machines. Remember, in this world, supporting that village costs virtually nothing, because goods and consumables are manufactured in fully automated factories, and raw materials and power will be essentially free (solar is way past break-even already). So it'll be a worthwhile investment for a corporation to keep them around. Heck, if that does take off, it might even spur some deliberate selective breeding, where villages will try to boost their overall status by encouraging the smart people to get together and have lots of smart babies.  Other than mincome or communist agriculturalism, what else is there to do but die off as obsolete?  I'm holding out for cognitive upgrades and eventually hopefully uploading myself to something more reliable and repairable than this squishy meat-puppet. But that's another discussion. xD