We know there are serious problems. I think the general direction we are going to try to solve them is a good start, but without severely improving the current plans, will be completely inadequate and repeat history in some ways.

Many people have looked at the US' economic situation and compared it to China or other areas and predicted that the relatively high wealth and consumption in the US just cannot continue due to things like math (large deficits, low production of real goods, retired workers) and political pressure. The expectation for many is that there will eventually start to be a much more equitable distribution of resources and power towards places like China and/or Africa or India. This will mean there is significantly less real wealth for Americans. This, combined with the pressure to increase sustainability, means that the real world economy in the US is either not growing or growing very sluggishly.

When the economy is not really growing, our current systems don't function well, people start looking to conserve and cooperate rather than compete so much. A general trend of increasing socialism is good for the US to some degree I believe, but won't solve the problems.

What we have now are very large technopolies like Amazon, Google and Uber controlling large segments of our economy. Because the power is so concentrated, it is actually almost as bad as having government agencies control these things. Now people are talking about technocracy, which is essentially high-tech communism.

I used to advocate for a Resource Based Economy and all of that stuff, and I still think RBE and technocratic-type ideas are a good starting point to think about solutions, but it seems like the thought process is stuck in the 50s. Having very large organizations controlling everything is not going to work out,no matter how much technology you add to it.

The real problem for America is going to be less fossil fuels being able to be imported. Just because there is a big imbalance now, and unless we actually start nuking countries, within a few decades the demands will be such that those countries are forced to fight the US for those resources. In order to avoid WWII there has to be a plan that allows the US and other high-consumption countries to significantly reduce real-world consumption and still have functioning economies.

The problem is that we are looking at these giant tech companies just becoming more official and entrenched. This does give us platforms for efficiency, but the fact that these are centralized organizations means big problems in terms of power distribution and freedom as well as the evolvability of systems.

The solution is going to be technical upgrades to our social frameworks. A concrete example: Amazon has a streamlined website and logistic network. Instead of leaving this in the hands of one company, we need to come up with equivalent decentralized distributed protocols and systems that accomplish the same things without making Bezos the unofficial Minister of Distribution. I'm not saying it's easy, because we need systems with almost the same level of holistic integration and analysis on some levels that Amazon has, but still flexible enough to evolve and allow freedom.

We are also going to need these advanced distributed but holistic on some level evolvable systems to be properly integrated into societal structures in order to properly measure and plan if we want to have something like universal basic income. Although I must also say that we need also to facilitate free competition more at the same time otherwise the technopolies strangleholds prevent most from rising past the basic level and participating.