All this sounds pretty grim. Is there an upside to these likely events? Yes, we can foresee multiple things happening that will make this new reality bearable.

Everything will be much cheaper. Thanks to all tasks being done optimally by robots, everything from property to bread will be significantly cheaper. And by a lot.

Typically labour costs make up a huge part of any manufacturing process. When everything from acquiring raw materials to delivery is be done by machines, at each step we accumulate saving and the savings compound. The prices of goods and services equivalent to currently available quality and utility could go down by as much as 90%.

This means that even if you only have a low paying job, you will still be able to pay for your needs and live a comfortable lifestyle. You won’t have access to the casino on the moon, like the rich folks, but you will have your VR googles to enjoy a perfectly realistic immersive concert experience, and eating healthy cloned steak with vertically farmed broccoli on the side.

There will be new jobs that currently do not exist, and the demand for certain existing jobs will increase. In a highly technological and virtualised world, the demand for original human made objects, and human live performances will likely skyrocket.

People will be able to spend more time with their loved ones because either they can afford to, or because they have nothing else to do. Love, friendship, philosophy will gain a bigger importance. People will find meaning in engaging with each other and their own thoughts, instead of deriving self worth from their work and their achievements.

We will be able to clean up the mess created since the industrial revolution. When intelligent robots can do work tirelessly, we will be able to assign them to tasks that are currently unimaginable manually, like cleaning up the oceans, or do close to perfect recycling by picking out useful raw materials from garbage. Fundamental industry changing technologies are likely to emerge in the area of environmental protection as well. Packaging waste may no longer be a problem once we can design and mass produce materials that instantly decay away once discarded.

If you doubt the possibility of such technologies becoming the reality within 3 decades, look back to the year 1989. The web was just born, and people on talk shows laughed at the idea that people will work on the internet one day. Today, virtually everybody works on the internet at least partially (think of email and social media). Tablets and communicators that were imagined for the distant future in sci-fi movies like Star Trek are now a commodity, and our devices are way cooler than imagined. To top it off, technological advancement is not linear, but exponential. In the next 20–30 year we will experience as much innovation as we have seen in the last 100 years. The ideas I outlined above will be commonplace.