The human-driven driverless car

If that sounds absurd, it's not. If you're trying to take advantage of the computer driving to run up against your safety margin, that has further effects. Sure, most of the time the computerized cars could in fact drive mere inches from each other's bumpers, but in an emergency situation this means you have no margin. You can't both spend your margin and have it when you need it.

If anything I expect robotic cars to end up being more cautious than humans in the end. Automated cars will be able to precisely calculate the risks of given driving behaviors just by their nature, and I seriously doubt that car companies are going to have any stomach for permitting their cars to engage in complicated gas-saving car behaviors that will provably be more dangerous than driving safely, which I suspect will look rather a lot like what highways do now, except with less variance in the speeds.

One of the things I'm really curious about is whether during a winter storm the cars will simply refuse to drive. That will be an interesting cultural change up here where snow is actually a thing.

That space is of trivial importance compared to limited road space. Roads need to be used as efficiently as possible, as there's only so much asphalt/concrete between two points.

Given that both parents are working in developed countries, this is very important.

We're seeing this all over in the economy with Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc. As better rapid prototyping, artificial general intelligence, and moneyless transactions like BitCoin become mainstream, there will be less and less exchange of money.

However, the overall wealth created in the economy will only increase. We're rapidly approaching a point in time (well before the singularity) where human labor can't compete with automation. We can stick with the current system of capitalism where all of the gains go to a few at the top and everyone else is in a race to the bottom to preserve their jobs. Or..

We can adopt a system that works to maximize the social good instead of production, profits, influence, things that we might think of as 20th century goals. My current favorite alternative is cooperativism, where the workers own the means of production so there is no need for unions. One example is WinCo, which simultaneously provides lower prices than Walmart and higher wages/benefits to its employees because it doesn’t spend exorbitant amounts on advertising or dividends (which tend to run 15-30% of a for-profit corporation’s overhead, sometimes more).

Ironically one of the biggest problems with cooperativism is the lack of community ownership. So a company like Valve can be regarded as the epitome of cooperativism, where the workers can potentially make billions of dollars and the community makes nothing other than taxes. In many cases even those are waived, for example in Boise where I live, Micron and hp get enormous tax waivers to attract them. Some cities even pay corporations bonuses to move there.

So the only solution that I see is to raise taxes on businesses and to abandon the idea of corporate profits so that high income individuals pay the tax rates that the US enjoyed in its highest growth decades. That would mean a readjustment of our tax brackets to match inflation since then. I would suggest few or no taxes at or below the median individual income of roughly $40,000 per year, and then use a logarithmic scale beyond that. If it was base 2, then to double one’s net income, they would need to make 4 times as much, so $160,000 per year instead of $80,000. They would pay a tax of $80,000 on that or 50%. To make 4 times median, they would have to make $640,000 per year, and pay $480,000 in taxes or 75%. If base 2 seems too high, then society would vote on which base is most fair, probably settling on something similar to what we use today below $250,000 and eliminating the loopholes above that. This is basically a flat tax in a nonlinear system.

That way we get the wage/innovation benefits of a cooperative and the social benefit of a public income stream. As cooperatives become larger, they would have a choice to pay their workers in innovation (providing free food and benefits like Google) or pay society at large through taxes if they choose cash. In other words, society gets a win-win, because non-cash innovation is the stuff of Star Trek, and even cash is still cash.

The US GDP is $16 trillion, so spread over the 160 million workers, that’s roughly $100,000 per person. The missing $60,000 reflects our wealth inequality, which means we could switch to this system today and give everyone a basic income of $40,000 and the rich would have $20,000 to spare. In other words, tax policy alone could provide for everyone right now (the way they do it in social democracies like Finland) but since the US seems averse to that, I expect cooperativism to be the path of least resistance, meaning that capitalism will eventually adopt it as the social ills of vast wealth inequality become unpalatable and we seek a peaceful reconciliation (as opposed to an uprising like the French Revolution).

To answer your original question: the endgame here is that our union (the United States was originally a union after all) becomes a conglomerate of cooperatives, and eventually a cooperative itself. So a person could join a co-op and earn $40,000 above and beyond their state-provided basic income of $40,000. But since wealth inequality already takes a larger share of income than most people earn, I think we’ll find that people migrate toward a renaissance in leisure. After all, if wages had kept up with inflation, the minimum wage would be $22/hr today, and the median income would be twice as much, or about $80,000. That’s more than most people need to live on, so we’d see a lot of 4 day work weeks, 6 hour work days, 2 months off a year, and people investing half their income and retiring at 30 anyway (essentially a private basic income as opposed to a public one). That was supposed to be the American dream, but we’ve been swindled out of it by 30 years of trickle down economics. If this seems inflammatory, well, it is, and you’ll notice that you never hear about this on the mainstream media. Please check my figures. I stand by this premise and highly recommend learning about progressivism and the history of labor since the Gilded Age, and the various ways in which the country has backpedaled with things like the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which lowered regulations on wall street and led to the Dot Bomb, the Housing Bubble and the Great Recession.