On the plus side, if there really is no value to labour, then farm work must have been fully automated along with all the other roles.
On the down side, rich elites have historically had a very hard time truly empathising with normal people and understanding their needs even when they care to attempt it, so it is very possible that a lot of people will starve in such a scenario despite the potential abundance of food.
All roads lead to equality when the value of labour becomes 0 due to 100% automation.
Over history, lots of underclasses have been stuck that way for multiple generations, even without the assistance of a robot workforce that can replace them economically.
Some future rich class so empowered would be quite capable of treating the poor like most today treat pets. Fed and housed, but mostly neutered and the rest going through multiple generations of selective inbreeding for traits the owners deem interesting.
On the first, non-human pets rebelling is seen every time an abused animal bites their owner.
On the second, the hypothetical required by the scenario is that AI makes all human labour redundant: that includes all security forces, but it also means the AI moving around the security bots and observing through sensors is at least as competent as every human political campaign strategist, every human propagandist, every human general, every human negotiator, and every human surveillance worker.
This is because if some AI isn't all those things and more, humans can still get employed to work those jobs.
No reason, except their (the rich or the AI) own personal desire to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
> They're absolutely useless alive from an economics perspective, and so would probably be better served ground up into fertilizer or some other actually useful form.
Indeed. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."
But while some may care about disassembling this world and all non-rich-human life on it to make a Dyson swarm of data centres, there's also the possibility each will compete for how many billions of sycophants they can get stoking their respective egos.
The "problem" with many modern jobs is that they're divorced from the fundamental goal, which is one of: 1) Kill/acquire food, 2) Build shelter, or 3) Kill enemies/competitors/predators
The benefit of modern jobs is that they are much more peaceful ways for society to operate, freeing up time for humans to pursue art and other forms of expression.
If AI and robots are able to do all the jobs, being idle isn't the negative it has always been.
All through history, you needed lots of non-idle people to do all the work that needed to be done. This is a new situation we are coming upon.
Please note I’ve never had this problem before, until recently.