Take for instance Jason Pratt who points out the foolishness of previous Progressive-era social policies, like "the 40-hour workweek, the income tax, Social Security, and child labor laws (including truancy laws.)." Policies like those were unnecessary restrictions on the free market :

Child labor would have gone the way of the dodo bird anyway (no parent *wants* to send their child to dangerous factory work, and only economic growth can deliver us out of that scenario). We restricted child labor to enforce adult labor, and now we are faced with robot labor. So Marshall wants to restrict adult labor (a shorter workweek), and provide for unemployment (longer unemployment benefits.) A rehash of the Progressive movement.

Crazy talk! Apparently unfazed by the sudden collapse of the neo-liberal capitalist model, and the public criticism/self-criticism sessions that have the Friedmanites publicly recanting in every fora in which they can still get a hearing (Fox News not counting), Mr. Pratt insists

Some people (young people for example) love to work 80 or 100 hours a week...Let's let the chips fall where they may this time. A creative, vibrant economy is critical to solving this global challenge. Anything we do via government to "soften the blow" is likely to make the next challenge even harder to solve.

Now that's a "crack of a future dawn" Singularitarian utopia we can all get behind: 100 hour work weeks, no unemployment benefits, and your kids working right alongside you. Think of it as a family-friendly S^ vision.

Kevin Dick's (and no, I did not make up Mr. Pratt and Mr. Dick's names, just as Marshall's name really is Mr. Brain) summary of the Singularity Summit events loved all the "Yes we can built it and the gods will come" enthusiasm but had two big complaints. First Vernor Vinge, namer of the Singularity idea, opened the meeting with an interview in which he propounded the "glaringly erroneous" idea that

as humans outsource their cognition to machines, the number of jobs suitable for humans will narrow. Economic history contradicts this theory.

Mr. Dick could also add computer scientist Hans Moravec to his tut-tut list, since Moravec proposed in Robot that we should expand Social Security to cover all humans after robots take all the jobs. Of Marshall Brain, who is a computer scientist, founder of the HowStuffWorks website that he just sold for an eye-popping $250 million, and author of pieces like "How an Economic Depression Works" Mr. Dick opines

It’s not a good idea to discuss the economic implications of AI and robotics when you don’t understand anything about economics.

Yo, fellow meatbag, isn't this the conference about the idea that greater than human intelligence will be such a profound rupture with all human history that we can't predict the outcome? So that Singularity idea applies to everything except the magical capability of the market to find ways for human beings to compete in labor markets with super-capable robots, which you think is easily extrapolable from the migration of human peasants into human industrial jobs and then into shuffling meaningless numbers through computers with human fingers? What exactly are the jobs you imagine humans doing better than robots and AI in the Singularity future?

Patri Friedman chimes in with the dismissive comment

Marshall Brain's (talk) was full of zero-sum thinking, and contained claims trivially refuted by Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage...

I guess that means, as Anders Sandberg has pointed out, that even though the supposed Singularity-level AIs are supposed to be as much smarter than us as we are to ants, that we will somehow figure out a way to do and trade something with AIs that they want. Like we do with ants.

But wait. Mr. Friedman also foresees a solution to human unemployment in the rapid AI ascension to godlikeness:

5 years after robots can do chores around the house, they won't want to anymore! A robot smart enough to be helpful will be smart enough to demand an income and to spend that income on getting smarter.

Ah, finally an argument for libertopian policy that takes Singularitarianism seriously. We won't need public policies for a structurally unemployed world because all our toasters and ovens will become so smart that they will stop working for carbon-based life forms, and we will be back to hiring human cooks to hold our bread over open fires. So we get full employment, so long as Skynet lets us live. Lovely.

Laudably S^ Summit reviewer "retired urologist" seems to get it in his summary of Marshall's argument:

Left to free-market policies, there will be a marked redistribution of wealth, with concentration at the top. He encourages social and governmental plans now to address this inequity. Interestingly, given the same information, Peter Diamandis, of the X-Prize Foundation, draws the opposite conclusion. He feels that wealth concentration in a relative few hands makes for more efficient philanthropy and drives innovations in technology...Democrats versus Republicans.

OK, you could put a partisan gloss on the observation that the unfettered free market certainly will or probably won't provide universal economic welfare for all after the Singularity. Then again this is an election year in which the party that started nationalizing the banks and calling for the nationalization of home mortgages is accusing the party that wants a slightly more progressive income tax of being "socialist." We're all Mensheviks this year, and the free market fundamentalists aren't even Republicans any more, they're just in deep denial.

Here's a little testable prediction about whether the AI/automation-induced structural unemployment thesis is correct or not. When we start to come out of this casino capitalism-induced global depression, sometime in the next one to five years, watch to see if the number of new jobs created is as anemic as it was in the 2002-2005 recovery from the 2000-2001 dot.com bust. If so, it is a clue that we are in fact slowly shifting toward an economy in which investments in automation and IT are more profitable than investments in human jobs.

Then again, the market fundamentalists are sure to simply insist in 2012 that we are all still living under socialism, and that if we just removed all regulation, social welfare and taxes we would see unemployment eliminated.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union one could still find Communists who insisted real Communism had not yet been tried, and of course one can still find flat earthers, young earth creationists and all manner of delusional true believers. I'm a sociologist so I expect and celebrate willfull irrationality, especially around an idea like the Singularity which stirs up so many millennial passions. But just as Superman can probably beat up Spiderman, doesn't the godlike AI trump the godlike invisible hand?