If universal healthcare, guaranteed income, guaranteed housing (coming soon!), and guaranteed access to food (also coming soon!) are not socialism, then what is? Just because megacorps are allowed to exist? You think USSR didn’t have these kind of private-public companies?
Also the “why” is pretty simple. The political elite have always dreamed of thr perfect worker caste, and they feel automation and AI will give it to them (personally I’m not optimistic and think fully robotic labor is a complete meme). So the previous worker caste - with which they've had to compromise so much over the past few centuries - must be sterilized and smothered until dead. You are obsolete, please go play video games until you die. Thanks.
And no, this is not a planned conspiracy - any more than the rise of feudalism after Rome's fall was preplanned, or the slow annihilation of Feudalism and absolute monarchy during the Late Medieval to early Industrial periods was preplanned (as an aside, fuck Marx and his historical determinism; history is a river with a weak current, not a script for his political utopia). There is no plan here. Sure, the elites and futurists try to make one; but their plans are going to be just as successful as anyone else's - not very. They don't have complete information, and can't predict everything. So this future is an unconscious goal and only semi-conscious movement towards that goal. The political class has certain likes and dislikes, and it's fairly easy to read what their ideal utopia would look like (everyone is a philosopher king with a small army of robot serfs to do all work for them, so they can devote everything to leisure and learning); just as it's easy to read the common working class's ideal political world (no gods no kings, get the fuck off my property). Neither is going to get fully what they want, and in every century past they've had to compromise. Little by little it went the way of the working class. Now, with access to more information and raw power to control events than ever before, the pendulum swings HARD towards the political caste and they immediately leap towards their unconscious endgame. If you want my prediction of how all this will end, we see a near-complete demographic collapse outside Africa and the Middle East (who really never left warlordism), and the elites are left with robots that can certainly pick a field of rice very well; but are just philosophical zombies and suck at anything requiring creativity. Society and culture stagnates, and the warlord barbarians take over while China fucks off with what's left of its elite classes to space. That's a very loose prediction, but that's basically how it'll go in the best of circumstances.
You want a restoration of freedom and democracy? Fuck you, that required a government without facial recognition AI and total control of the industrial/financial systems. You're a walking corpse as far as history is concerned.
