Everyone could have his own small farm, fab and robots. No need to rely on "big men" competing for karma points from the peasants.
It's going to be some damn thing when everyone in the South takes your idea and they build up their civilization around free robotic labor, and then when we hit AI sentience and start ensuring the civil rights of robots the entire South has to be burned to the ground again to free the sentient robots from their owners.
We can still do the fun stuff of course, like writing and art, and get famous and all that.
But most modern AI is learnt from data, not programmed, how will we know if our AI in conscious?
We're not there yet and may never be, but since we do not know what consciousness is or what leads to it, we may stumble into it...
Human labor has solved a lot of problems. The obvious shortcut to solving lots of problems is mimicking human labor. Given the opportunity to take a shortcut to solve a problem (especially at a profit) some manager in some business will do it.
And zero people can even describe how a sentient robot could be constructed, even with theoretical future hardware. "We'll have as many flops as some models say a brain has, and programmers are creative" is about as far as anyone can get, but I don't think that qualifies as a plan.
So, it's a fun thing to think about, but like all sci-fi it probably isn't the best basis for societal planning.
In order to perform at or above human level (in a general fashion), the robot will need a firm, comprehensive understanding of the world. Won't this unavoidably involve an understanding of the self as well?
I don't think any chips today have awareness. But it seems to me that you couldn't have general, adaptable intelligence without it.
I give self-replicating factories a higher probability than AGI. We'll probably have a 100% automated stack that can replicate and repair itself, as well as produce everything we need, all based on locally sourced and plentiful materials, before we have human level AI. It will be a manufacturing singularity. We should bootstrap automation in itself, like we bootstrap compilers. Object production would become similar to compilation, from source code to material object. We'd have optimized material compilers.
When we have a replicator, anyone can have one. Industry would become like agriculture, if you have the initial seeds, you can plant and then you bootstrap your crop.
If you think about self replication, on the whole, industry is a self replicator right now. But we need to make it fully automated, reduce its minimal footprint and make it less reliant on rare materials. There is a need for sustainable, smart materials and open source automation and AI in order to save the population from disenfranchisement. Capital and the means of production should belong to all of us, not just the 1%.
Fresh water, for example, is a scarce (and becoming scarcer) resource, and it's impossible to farm or live without it.
Agree with the comment about ownership. As technology has improved, more and more power has been going to whoever owns the capital.
The problem is that energy is expensive, and fresh water shortages will be worst in countries that are poor and can't afford these plants.