Several of your assumptions are questionable.
There won't be rent - when we reach a high enough level of AI and automation we'll have to become a post-money society. Housing and food will be a human right freely distributed.
There won't be unlimited resources, either. Not everyone who asks for a 10,000 square foot penthouse suite on top of a 100-story building will be able to have one, and there will be some mechanism to limit a person from taking 10,000 calories of food each day and throwing most of it in the trash. Whether humans or AGIs are in charge, some attention will be paid in even a post-scarcity society to rationing resources and preventing waste.
I also don't ever see AGI "calling the shots" outside an apocalyptic Skynet scenario. It will be put in charge of a lot, things like handling all the frustrating bureaucratic crap, and it will be a guide and assistant to helping us make better decisions, but ultimately humans will still want to have final say in a democratic process.
Other scenarios could lead to AGI control. A "non-apocalyptic Skynet scenario" is possible, in which the machines violently take over Earth with relatively few deaths and little destruction of infrastructure. Humans would realize the situation was hopeless and surrender.
There is also a scenario where AGIs take over gradually and bloodlessly without humans realizing it until it's too late. We would let them incrementally increase their ownership of economic assets and decision-making authority in the name of convenience and efficiency until we were totally dependent on them, and they had in fact found a million ways to coerce us into doing things we didn't want to do. It would be analogous to how human advertisers, politicians, journalists, intelligence agencies, and tycoons manipulate our thinking and behavior today.
There are multiple pathways to AGI world domination in which humans who want to, say, live in tall buildings are denied it by machines and made to live elsewhere.
And the other point was that outside of a rogue AGI antagonistic of humanity, it'll never be left up to the AGI - humans will demand final say, even if it is only to go with the machine's superior logic.
On a long enough timeline, humans like us lose the final say, either
de jure or
de facto, and there are more routes to that situation than the one you mention. For example, by the year 2500, only 1 million
Homo sapiens like us might be left, vs. 100 billion radically evolved posthumans and intelligent robots that vastly out-vote the remaining natural humans.
money itself, won't exist
Why? A medium of exchange is essential to the functioning of an economy larger than a village. I don't see why this would stop being true in a post-scarcity society. Even if everything were "free" for humans, there would still be invisible prices attached to all goods and services we consumed. Someone would be monitoring it.
Now factor in declining birthrates across the developed and even much of the developing world, add in the many deaths coming from the mix of famine, war, climate change, pandemics, and other disasters that'll be more prevalent in the next few to several decades, and we might actually be looking at fewer humans that'll need housing, not more.
It's a mistake to assume current demographic trends will hold for decades. Look at population growth projections from 30 or 40 years ago and see how inaccurate they were.
Technology that radically expands human lifespan will be available this century, and will counterbalance other factors. If no one dies anymore, then even a low birthrate of one child per woman over her lifetime will cause a resumption in population growth.
Your assumptions about various disasters killing off large segments of the population are super questionable. Consider this: Even if we accept the 20 million
upper estimate for global COVID-19 deaths from January 2020 - January 2022, it barely dented the size of the human population. During the same period, the population grew by 247 million people. COVID-19 is the worst pandemic we've had in 100 years, and its net effect on the size of our species has practically been a rounding error.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-r ... -2020.html
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-r ... -2022.html
Even if future disasters killed 10 million humans a year, our species would not be threatened.
And people like a skyline with skyscrapers, especially over the alternative of a sea of low level housing for as far as the eye can sea - fewer floors up means more ground space required. Cities will need to grow out instead of up, and while that might be more optimized, people are starting to get sick and nauseous of seeing us bulldozing nature around us for more buildings.
SOME people like living in cities and seeing skyscrapers dominating the horizon. Many other people like living in the countryside, in small towns where the tallest building is three stories, in the suburbs, or in trendy city neighborhoods consisting of low-rises.
Many people are oblivious to the destruction of nature and just want their new-construction suburban house, regardless of how many trees had to be cut down to make the lot available.
In the future we won't need office space, since we won't need to work, so most skyscrapers actually will be just housing in the future unlike today. Imagine if people were actually living on all 100 stories instead of most of it being used for office space (a trend we're already beginning to see now with remote work finally making headway - many skyscrapers are struggling to find businesses to lease all this empty office space to).
I think this is the best point you made, even if I think it might turn out wrong. COVID-19 accelerated the global switch to telework by at least a decade, but I think it might have overshot the mark a bit, and that organizations will soon start demanding their employees show up in the office at least once a week. Also, not every office skyscraper can be converted to residential use. People like having windows in their houses, and giving every unit access to a window means creating a building whose footprint resembles an elongated rectangle. A lot of office buildings have square or circular footprints, meaning there's a lot of volume in the middle that would be unsuitable for human habitation.
