That's a taxation problem. They keep prices lower and provide substantial competition across countless industries including web services.

Their pay for workers is also pretty high and they offer to pay off tuition and more. I know it's fun and popular to hate them, but I personally blame the politicians who write the tax code.

I would say that democracy and government is the most critical thing we can do today to protect the future. Doing that will go a long way to taking care of the rest.

I personally expect the developers of longevity medicine to want to profit from it so they'll make it widely available and likely sell it to the government because a biologically young workforce can be far more valuable than an aging one.

Although for instance Bezos may be rich, Amazon does provide substantial value to the majority of people at least in the USA by competing and lower cost and increasing quality across a lot of markets. Similar things can be said for bill gates and making computers accessible to mass markers.

While extraordinary wealth may be generated, it will only be generated if the technology affects a mass market.

Predicting anything 20+ years away is impossible. There's likely to be so many unknown variables including what happens when new technologies converge.

For instance quantum computing seems likely to be feasible in the 2030s. Combine that with the more advanced AI simulation modeling and optimization that could use quantum and silicon compute simultaneously to run massive accurate models and then optimize on them. Combine that AI with a far more advanced large language model style AI that can comprehend a large amount of paralleling big data science including genetics, epigenetics, bioelectricity, microbiome, and more. Then combine that with far more advanced lab on a chip technology and automated labs for rapid physical testing in highly optimized through digital analysis treatments and well it's clear that we're talking about magnitudes and magnitudes of an improvement over current methods of medical developments.

That's also just the stuff we know is coming, if we're talking 2050 then well there's going to be a lot of things we're completely blind to coming as well.

Edit: This has little to do with politics. Obviously we all need to vote and defend democracy if you can. The wealthy should in my view be taxed higher so that we could reinvest those funds like back in the 50s and 60s again. With that being said my comment is about the science and technology which is promising and is what brings clear prosperity to the masses, just look at the median worker in the 1800s or 1600s compared to today and it's clear how wealth is generated by technology and increases in productivity which is key to building a utopia.

It's something pretty commonly discussed. There just isn't the budget for the solution most of the time. Money and production drives everything and causes people to need to make trade offs and prioritize things. If they had all the money and production imaginable then they wouldn't have to pick trade offs but sadly we do.

I mean they do care about light pollution, and you could have all the street lighting you want without light pollution if you just prevent the light from going up. Good lighting prevents crime and improves safety.

But when it comes to anything cities have to weigh budget priorities and shading the top of light posts just doesn't have the priority as other things.

No idea. Releasing a bunch of engineered plants that I assume would reproduce and spread may also not be the best idea.

It's pretty simple. It costs money to add a shade, they don't have the budget for it so they don't.

We literally just have to put shades over the top of lights to direct it down towards the street and prevent it from going elsewhere.

Honestly I'm not sure and have been curious about that myself. It could just be that all the other technologies aren't reliable enough yet as well.

Rapid response technology is close but not there yet. It would require constant satellite surveillance for heat signatures (which we either have the capacity to do today or will within 5-10 years). Beyond that you need a swarm of autonomous heavy lift drones that can fill up and actually carry enough water which likely requires better batteries to be economical since today's best heavy lift drones are limited to a few hundred pounds. I do expect it to be something we're close to having though. Beyond that ideally you would want some form of AI to check to make sure it is the start of a forest fire and not something else (this should be pretty easy given burn bans and fire spreading and such) If we could respond to forest fires really quickly they become a lot less of a problem and it would allow us to grow forests again to help with carbon capture (forest fires release all the carbon captured from said forest).

I suspect once its feasible it will be done fairly quickly because as you said forest fires are becoming extremely expensive and well life altering so the economics and demand are definitely there.

Much of the technology we're creating today and in the future are increasing efficiencies dramatically to reduce foot prints rather than increasing them. For instance vertical farming and lab grown meat is promising for dramatically reducing the foot print taken up by agriculture which is the largest land user by far.

Beyond that Nuclear Fusion makes desalination and pumping for water distribution pretty straight forward so that we don't have any water restraints.

There are some rare earth materials that could act as bottle necks, but I would assume by the time we have that level of automation we will both have substantially better recycling (as you state) and asteroid mining as well as more economical refining and processing due to much cheaper (and abundant) energy.

Tritium (powering Fusion) seems like it may be a bottle neck for fusion, but moon mining could provide plenty of that and we should be able to make more of it within a reactor. If we also develop higher temp super conducting magnets then other fusion reactions become available at 10X the energy levels which don't require tritium and also don't create any radioactive byproduct.

If we create the holy grail of material science aka the room temperature super conductor then we should be able to generate magnetic fields strong enough to use this type of reaction in a portable fusion reactor that has an arc radius as small as 2 inches. That would be able to power everything from buildings to larger flying vehicles to space craft (that energy could likely propel a craft to escape velocity without rocket fuel and then switch over to an ion-drive while in space). A miniaturized fusion reactor could bring forth the flying car and do away with the needs for roads and surface infrastructure such that all cities are simply connected by the sky. This amount of energy combined with automation could make it so carbon super materials become the building material of choice and since we have an absurd amount of carbon (4th most abundant material in the Universe) and said materials are absurdly strong we would likely never run out if we can mine it from space.

Ion propulsion while being fairly weak today, could also power flying vehicles in the future if combined with a portable fusion reactor to do away with props or jet engines. Though personally I'm hesitant to suggest we'll do away with all land based travel given that I can't imagine a bunch of high speed thrust from flying vehicles all over the place being that great within cities, perhaps within cities we'll just have more and more subways and trams and stacked infrastructure.

The combination of abundant clean energy with lab grown meat, vertical farming, automation that removes limits from productivity, and more makes us be able to live in a rather small and sustainable foot print even if we do something like reverse aging we would still be rather sustainable for centuries just on earth without moving out to other planets and while conserving far more natural environment than we do today. All of this would also allow us to begin to control the climate since we'll have access to those levels of energy and technologies like carbon capture would enable us to maintain a certain optimal zone for ppm of carbon where we prevent global warming and ice ages. That and we'll be able to rapidly respond to things like forest fires with automated response drones within minutes due to satellite monitoring to ensure they never get out of control and forests are maintained with less destructive methods thanks to automation. With such unlimited productivity we would be able to easily invest into things we simply can't afford to today to allow us to more be the keepers and protectors or our climate and environment and planet rather than the destroyers of it. We wouldn't think twice about putting up a fence along a highway along with nature bridges to prevent collisions with wild life because it would simply be cheap to do so. These energy levels would also allow us to cancel out tornadoes and well computer simulations combined with such high energy levels may even allow us to control severe weather events.

With all that being said, the one issue I could see running up against is literally using so much energy that we heat up the planet. We would therefore need a way of basically removing energy from the closed system of earth like a planetary heat sink.

If productivity increases to the point of not needing 99.9% of jobs because robots can make robots and therefore lead to very fast compounding gains in production then it would spread globally very quickly. I also don't believe we'll get to that amount of post work society till that point since as long as there is a bottleneck in production that requires a human, we will likely fill it with as many humans as we can to increase productivity (at least that's what we've done thus far).

Once you eliminate the human element from increasing productivity then you would quickly (relatively) meet global demand for it at which point humans (paired with AI assistants) jobs will be to primarily create new demands for production through defining how to restructure society, what questions to focus on answering and what major problems to solve. I suspect one of the first major problems will be how to expand human intelligence so that instead of competing with AIs we are linked with them such that production and less fun work can be carried out by our subconscious AI while controlling a vast network of production robots while we focus our conscious selves on whatever it is that we want to. Perhaps this will also enable us to have a more shared intelligence as well where discoveries are shared throughout the population nearly instantly.

The combination of quantum simulation combined with robotic automation and AI modeling will enable rapid iteration of far more efficient means of scientific discovery and optimization. Combine that with the ability to remove all humans from producing productivity robots and high energy sources like fusion energy or other sources and the compounding gains will be completely unfathomable.