Comment by panny

>controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat

This has been the situation for CPUs for decades. We now carry a 1980 cray super computer in our pockets.

>For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.

They won't need to engineer a Terminator style genocide of mankind. Man will kill each other in another war, like we always do. Biological imperatives mean we all kill each other until resources are abundant for those left standing. Then the winners of that war have a baby boom, their children are boomers for the next 80 years, and we start all over again.

The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.