> If the rich need less and less educated, healthy and well fed workers, then more and more people will get treated like shit
Maybe. I think it's a matter of culture.
Very few people mistreat their dogs and cats in wealthy countries. Why shouldn't people in power treat regular people at least as well as regular folks treat their pets?
I'm no history buff but my hunch is that mistreatment of people largely came from a fear that if I don't engage in cruelty to maximize power, my opponents will and given that they're cruel, they'll be cruel to me when they come to take over.
So we end up with this zero sum game of squeezing people, animals, resources and the planet in an arms race because everyone's afraid to lose.
In the past - you couldn't be sure if someone else was building up an army, so you had to build up an army. But now that we have satellites and we can largely track everything - we can actually agree to not engage in this zero sum dynamic.
There will be a shift from treating people as means to an end of power accumulation and containment, to treating people as something you just inherently like and would like to see prosper.
It'll be a shift away from this deeply corrosive idea of never ending competition and growth. When people's basic needs are met and no one is grouping up to take other people's goodies - why should regular people compete with one another?
They shouldn't and they won't. People who want to do good work will do so and improving the lives of people worldwide will be its own reward. Private islands, bunkers and yachts will become incomprehensible because there'll be no serf class to service any of it. We'll go back to if you want to be well liked and respected - you have to be a good person. I look forward to it :)