To anyone interested about the history of human evolution, I highly recommend Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. It's the best book I have read about human history and how we have evolved until now. The book is also listed on the Gates Summer reading list.
"...the power of the masses, that we are so used to, is rooted in particular historical conditions, economic, military, political, which characterized the 19th and 20th centuries. These conditions are now changing, and there is no reason to be certain that the masses will retain their power."
When he says humans will become useless in the economic sense, i wonder:
When looking at the value created by the average human job, you see a constant decline in that - most of history human though wars, produced basic food, shelter, health. But today, many humans produce stuff that is far from necessary, we could live well with far less of those products and services. Heck, we even semi-deliberatly construct out economy in that way, for example, by creating/allowing tools like advertising and planned-obsolescence, tools that enable the rise of the consumption economy.
So maybe that's a trend, an we need to look where humans+machines are preferred over machines, just barely, and construct our economy around that ?
This is a 2015 conversation but was interesting as I recall.
On people becoming superfluous to the market and the state as machine intelligence progresses:
"... [in the future, work no longer exists for] most of humanity... That mass of people cannot work, but they can still kill people..."
"and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless?
My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most"
On "one of the big problems with technology":
"It develops much faster than human society and human morality, and this creates a lot of tension. But, again, we can try and learn something from our previous experience with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, that actually, you saw very rapid changes in society, not as fast as the changes in technology, but still, amazingly fast.
The most obvious example is the collapse of the family and of the intimate community, and their replacement by the state and the market."