@jehu And this gets to the heart of it - the unsustainability of social reproduction in the current regime of things.

I think what's going to happen will be more interesting than the simple Singularitarian scenarios. On paper, or more likely in a database or perhaps more trendily a blockchain, a small number of super-rich individuals own half the world. But what does this ownership actually comprise of? I mean, in pure materialistic nuts-and-bolts terms. Really it boils down to people's willingness to abide by and enforce certain systems of rules, which are primarily made by the rich to serve their own interests.

As more of the population becomes surplus to Capital and falls outside of its reproduction cycle I think those rules will melt away like spirits in the mist. Sure, the super-rich will try to use the most automated methods to maintain enforcement, and this is what's happening now with bulk surveillance and militarized police. Ultimately though there will just be more of us than them and I think attempts at automated lockdown of all peoples will fail.