What Will Happen?

"What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of a massively new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty? What will happen to human society when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies, and to open unprecedented gaps between rich and poor?"
-Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, 2017), Chapter 7, p. 314.

Four weighty questions. Four more: Is artificial intelligence imminent? Are economically useless people useless? Have family structures not already changed throughout history? Will the production of unprecedented wealth not enable society to eliminate the gap between rich and poor?

More importantly for this blog, Poul Anderson addressed precisely these questions in many works from the Psychotechnic History to The Boat Of A Million Years. Read them. You already did? They bear a lot of rereading.