If we lived in a true post-scarcity society, managing the distribution of wealth would be easy. Politicians have shown that they are good at this, as seen during the coronavirus crisis when they provided generous compensation packages to companies that had to close. In a post-scarcity society, we could simply print more money and distribute it as needed. However, the current crisis is not a post-scarcity crisis and politicians know that printing more money would not help. If the current crisis (inflation/energy crisis) turns into a depression or recession, we may see new compensation packages and possibly even universal basic income.

My concern with the singularity is not the potential for a post-scarcity environment, but the disruptions that could occur on the way there. For example, white collar jobs may become redundant before manual labor jobs. This could happen both within and between countries. In the case of manual labor within a country, the solution is simple: distribute the remaining work among the workers who have been made redundant so everyone has to do some amount of the work not yet automated. However, if commodities are still scarce in this environment, Western countries may have difficulty trading their white collar hours for these commodities. Some countries are better positioned than others to deal with this problem. For example, the United States has a lot of natural resources it could exploit, while some European countries have practically none.

It is important to note that these concerns are not meant to be alarmist. They are just the potential "extreme endpoint" of a world where things become unbalanced and what was valuable before suddenly isn't, and white-collar jobs are lost before manual labor jobs. Hopefully, in practice, this will not happen all at once and AI will also make manual labor redundant in parallel as well as improve our ability to find and use commodities, allowing for a more gradual adjustment. But it's hard to say. The AIs seem to be really good at white collar work.