ABSTRACT
This chapter offers three snapshots of a possible future, taken in 2025, 2035 and 2045. Their purpose is to make the possibility of technological automation seem more real and less academic, and to explore how a positive outcome might unfold, with a concluding vision of an economy of radical abundance which has been achieved without massive social dislocation. In most countries, the citizens' income is funded by taxes levied on the minority of wealthy people who own most of the productive capital in the economy, and in particular on those who own the Artificial Intelligence infrastructure. In many countries, some of the wealthy people have agreed to transfer the productive assets into communal ownership, either controlled by the state or by decentralised networks operated using blockchain technology. The art of constructing a useful scenario is similar to forecasting, which has been extensively studied by Canadian political scientist Philip Tetlock, co-author of the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.
