Useless? They still have to buy all that crap that is currently sold to them.

No need to sell things at that point. Just produce and consume whatever you want.

Fully agree. We need to stop thinking about money, wealth, etc. The fundamental issue is access to goods and services. If it is easy to build an AI robot that can build a few copies of itself which in turn create a private jet using stuff lying around on the ground, I'm not really poor though I have no money (just the robo).

So the challenge for the bad capitalists in this hypothetical is to make sure I never get said robo in the first place. How realistic will this be? Are they that hellbent on ensuring that everyone else is poor?

you can also translate "being useless" as "they having no reason to manipulate me into slaving as a cog in their machine/society/whatever"... I'd say uselessness should be our highest aspiration, when people higher up have no need to constantly brainwash you and social condition you into being just another cog in the machine you get true freedom.

I would rather be a cog that produces economic value, and therefore is entitled to part of it, than literally useless, because then my bargaining position is going to be quite limited. My freedom is larger in the former scenario in fact.

Unless you have some social value that you can barter with

The true freedom of living under a bridge because you have no income? The tech bros are not coming to save humanity from the toil of labor. There will not be a post-scarcity society where everyone's basic needs will be met in a capitalist regime. You will have to produce to keep the beast running. I'm sure the tens of millions of people displaced will be able to learn more technical roles or quietly starve to death living under a bridge somewhere. Billionaires, corporations and their shareholders need to get richer!

We live in a capitalist society: workers produce wealth and capitalists control wealth. The day AI allow capitalists to produce wealth without workers is the day workers become useless. Of course one could imagine that AI allows to replace capitalism by something else, but for the moment that's not the way society is going too (more the reverse)

In what fairlyland do you live in that the AGI invented, created, owned, run, etc by the ownership class poses any threat to said ownership class? AI is absolutely not our Ally

I think you misunderstood me

>one could imagine that AI allows to replace capitalism by something else

I was replying to this specific concept. There will never be a chance to improve the non-owner class's bargain after Capitalist owned AGI exists.

Robotics still has a way to go.