I meant Walmart helping employees sign up for food stamps in order to supplement its cheaper wages.
Ok. I misunderstood.
Pushing employees to sign up for augmentations would likely be a no-brainer save perhaps for certain corporations that were owned by a small group of people opposed to transhumanism.
I’m not certain that the kind of augmentations which would provide an economic advantage would be offered by socialist medicine. Many surgeries for transsexualism are considered “optional cosmetics” except in a growing range of programs which have sustained continued pressure from right’s groups. How many social health programs offer state of the art computerized legs versus just shoving a glorified peg leg in place?
I suspect what is more likely to happen is a scenario supposed by Human Revolution: a volunteer soldier gets injured, volunteers for experimental augmentation, and then outperforms normal soldiers. The necessity is drug up because people with knowledge implants or faster legs are more performant than not. This same problem came out with the advent of phones (and later cellular phones); bosses preferred employees who could be harassed 24/7, and so many workplaces require 24/7 cell phone availability.
I don't know if this would be a necessity under socialist versions of transhumanism, but I agree this sort of thing will likely be a bigger problem for governments attempting to prevent a massive chasm between those who can afford augmentations and those who cannot.
Do governments even care? Again, the gap between the rich and the poor is rarely helped by governments. A lot of programs designed to “help” the poor usually end up being either boondoggles or cause massive deficits–those deficits are then filled by overtaxing the working-or-lower classes and almost never comes out of the top (who use tax shelters and/or have legions of accountants.)
I think the idea that a government would care anything about augmentation is kind of silly; they would care if it became a threat to the gravy boat, likely nothing more. Maybe a big scare campaign could change that, in the same vein as the craze to ban butterfly knives or drugs using nothing but unsubstantiated claims and fear mongering?
I don't think this really gets around the problem you mentioned - so instead of one corporation it's five? From the perspective of the guy at the bottom of the totem pole it's not clear if oligarchies are better than monopolies.
Monopolies and zaibatsus have very well defined and observed problems. An example of this is how Bell was able to charge practically infinite amounts of phone services, or how IBM did the same with making people both purchase mainframes in-house and then secondarily charging them licensing for CPU time. Both of these practices were eventually killed because of backlash. Unfortunately these companies now group up in “associations” and have pretend-competition, which leaves us back in the monopoly situation of Bell practically existing and deciding the cost of US internet prices. Other countries who aren’t just Bell clones have laughably better internet cost/speed ratios than the US does!
So yes, five oligarchs are better than a monopoly because they generate friction off of each other and this means jobs for people at the very least. When you have no friction (e.g. a monopoly) innovation stops wholesale and everyone is worse off for it. Afterall, why would you ever need to make your product better if everyone is legally prohibited from copying it in any way?
I don't know if the comparison you're making between the ill [of today] and underclass I'm predicting is apt. The percentage of the population you're talking about is much smaller than the number of people who can - and thus IMO will - be replaced by machines & AIs.
Maybe people will stop overpopulating the planet with so many children (especially families who can’t support the ones they have, yet refuse to have protected sex) that aren’t needed?
I'm also not talking about curing illnesses but rather altering yourself in some way for the sake of being employable. Perhaps in the long run the technologies are so cheap that everyone gets the best H+ package available yet it's not clear how long that run would be.
People happily plunge themselves in to debt (sometimes over 50k$!) to get college degrees, which then in a growing number of cases turn out to be ultimately worthless–and thus worthlessly accrued debt. Yet, there is no big government-backed solution to crack down on overinflated tuition costs. So evidently, people don’t consider having to take on large debts for nothing more than *potential* wages as a problem that needs addressing. How is bioaugmentation different?
In the meantime, you could have a huge underclass that doesn't have augmentations or at least doesn't have good ones. This seems likely given that improvements in AI + gadgetry will severely reduce the need for humans in service & production sectors. I suppose this might result in more people taking improved birth control and thus lowering the percentage of people in generational poverty cycles. Might be a good long term solution given the expected reduction in per capita benefits as the aforementioned obsolescence of many, many people in the job market occurs.
Most people within a hegemony don’t care about anyone outside of it; I’m sure you can see how many middle-class employed Americans are concerned with starved Urgandian children. Or similarly well-off Europeans for that matter. Evidently, people as a whole do not appear to care.
One of the reasons we need a benevolent singularity is because it would likely care about said people, and help find a way to do something productive with them. Non-singularity humans seem rather uncaring about people in lower castes, even without technology.