Manned missions have always been a budgeting headache because they take a lot of money, a lot of time, and a consistent Congress, the last one rarer than the Holy Grail. US unmanned probes are more often on budget and have been quite successful overall.

("Manned" sounds misogynistic, but "humanned" and "peopled" sound awkward.)

...why focus on just AI? Liars have been around since the dawn of speech, and long before that if we include creatures who mock sounds and looks to trick prey.

But it will generate generations of buzzwords for salespeople to dupe clueless managers with. It's a sales efficiency algorithm. It's like greatly improving on a traveling salesperson algorithm, but by using deeper bullshit instead of better routes.

Hypercard influenced VB, one of the most most productive dev tools ever. We somehow de-evolved into bloated buggy learning-curve-heavy web stacks. Ooga Booga.

Most of the complaints about VB-like tools are fixable, but too few bothered to apply some R&D, instead throwing the baby out with the web water, giving us fucked up frameworks on top of the brain-damaged DOM and CSS. You humans are doing it wrong.

Git off my productive lawn, you wormy little buzzword fuckers!

Whenever amateurs and tinkerers use "low code" or Rapid App tools* to create apps, almost 90% turn into maintenance headaches in my experience. They "mostly work" up front, but either the original author leaves, or the app grows into too big a mess for the original author to fix.

The user group calls in the formal IT team to fix it, and then get angry when the formal IT team says, "they didn't use standard practices, made poor documentation, and we are not familiar with their tool". I expect AI "solutions" to be similar.

Formal IT groups are becoming orphanages. Now a rash of AI latchkey orphans are on their way...

Always remember, making the baby is the easy and fun part.

* Such tools don't inherently have to be bad, but in the hand of amateurs they usually are.

this won't end well, pun half-intended

not very resilient after all

They are "resealant" misspelled.

Probably because they are big enough to survive while a merger or acquisition is negotiated. It's the quiet way to die.

You've outlined the bad science fiction scenario that makes for an okay movie premise, but doesn't consider past history or the full implications of the hypothetical world. What stops one of these rich people from having his robots make other robots to distribute to the people without robots or using their robots to provide for those without robots? A large part of the expense of many goods and services is the human labor cost associated with providing it.

I'm not particularly concerned about the future you envision in your post. Trying to make plans about what to do concerning hypothetical futures is almost assuredly pointless when those plans are based on too much speculation to be useful when the eventual future does arrive. Most predictions about the future have historically been wrong, often in absurdly humorous ways. People focus too much on whatever they might be worried about that never comes to pass and miss entirely the things which they never considered.

I think we'll eventually get something like a UBI, not because humans cannot work, but because it's a more flexible, easier to administer, and more market-oriented form of social safety net. It may not be a perfect way of solving the problems of society, but it will be a more practical solution.

You're making an assumption that they want to cover their investment in a single year, which is unreasonable. Even the VCs in silicon valley are going to be skeptical of anything promising that as it's venturing into too good to be true territory. Instead a 7% annual growth over three years is just as good. Breaking even and getting pure profit after that is still an exceptional outcome as far as most investors are concerned.

It doesn't matter if you invent one because the same companies peddling woo or other crap will glom onto it in the same way they have branded themselves a "tech" company.

So, zero new products.

and they usually crashed into cows, not houses. Instant hamburger.

People used to manage...paper maps...while driving, back in the 1970's and earlier, without wrecking into people

Maybe they did, nobody noticed, news was different back then and crash stats were harder to put together.

Python is probably the wrong language. A compiled language like Java or C# seems a better fit for a staid company.