So. What will a post-singularity society look like?
Some random thoughts on the Singularity, in no particular order:
Humans in the aggregate are still important. We are their fail-safe. If They screw up, They can count on us to put everything back together.
Humans in the individual will be unimportant. More or less. Think of how the Greek Gods treated mortal men. They won’t go out of their way to make us happy, but They won’t go out of their way to make us miserable. That’s meant to be comforting.
You can probably expect:
Better management. Usually. Good, bad, or indifferent, things will be orderly. For the most part.
Population control. Really. Do we really need six billion people on the planet?
Euthanasia. They are not going to let you hook Granny up to a feeding tube and a resperator indefinitely. Neither are they going to hook you up indefinitely. Everything dies.
Big Cities. Economy of scale and all that.
New biological gizmos. Moving tatoos. Performance enhancers that don’t shrink your dick or make you crazy. Extended lifespans. Unbelivable sex.
New forms of biological life. Dolphins you can actually talk to. Uplifted animals. Designer pets.
A version of the Welfare State. Three squares, health care, and continuing education are a given. The quality of those three squares and the health care is strictly up to you. If you don’t work, you get crappy food and shitty health care. They have to keep you motivated to do something, after all.
Sabermetrics for humans. They will mitigate the more extreme forms of human misbehavior, but They will also master the art (or is it the science) of assembling teams that actually work. If the Oakland A’s can do it (see Moneyball), They can certainly do it for shlubs like us.
You probably shouldn’t expect:
Radical change for the base-lines (i.e. average joe humans), even given genetic engineering. We became the dominant life-form on the planet for a reason. even if the reason isn’t obvious to us. We’re their fail-safe if they screw up. We created them once. We can create them again, if necessary.
A consumer driven society. Not the way we’re used to it here in the good old U.S. of A. Capitalism will still exist. Corporatism will not.
You shouldn’t expect to matter. This is a real downer for type-A-my-penis-is-bigger-than-your-penis types. The robots have taken over, and you are insignificant to them, except as a substrate upon which they exist.
Privacy. That suppository isn’t just for good colon health, it’s got a camera and a mic, too.
Unfettered access to information. In the City of the Future you are still accountable for your actions, even if you really don’t have free will (will isn’t free, it has to be earned, like everything else). So, for every sensitive piece of information you acquire (like the formula for gelignite, say), you are also made aware of the penalty for misusing that knowledge. And They know that You know that They know. You know?