I don’t have much confidence that the ultimate end will be my second option (increased leisure for all) either. I see more and more of an underclass building up as less and less decent jobs go around, (and those who have good jobs still working 30-50 hours a week.) Stopping in the mid 90s would have has some automation, computerization that made some tasks easier but you would still need people to operate them. There’s no way the good jobs: people who want good jobs ratio is ever going to rise again, ad will continue to drastically fall leaving misery for the majority unless option 2 is embraced, (which it won’t be)
Exhibit A : the gig economy.
Note in my previous post the colon after “good jobs”. It was supposed to be without a space like a ratio, but the board software changed it to a smiley. Asimovian’s change makes the smiley disappear but now it doesn’t look like a ratio. Just making that clear. Thanks for the effort though Asimovian.
I’d freeze it to whenever a technologically caused global catastrophe happened. I can see that happening with nanotechnology in the not too far distant future.
I’m very wary of machines becoming sentient. I’d want to ride the “just about, but not quite sentient” line for as long as possible.
ETA: Just noticed. past only. :smack: I’d really like it if social media didn’t exist, but if I froze it there (say, 2002) a lot of other stuff that I really liked would be gone (e.g. decent smart phones). So I wouldn’t freeze anytime in the past.
Yes, in retrospect I would leave that caveat out. There are some really interesting ideas here I hadn’t considered, like the freeze/unfreeze cycle hoping human morality catches up to its available technology.
Personally though I wouldn’t freeze it at all, I’m interested to know what’s coming in the future, after all its not so long ago we couldn’t even be having this conversation!
Thanks for the answers everyone 
The interesting part of this, though, is how will our iron-clad economic theory deal with the absence of labor as the metric for wealth distribution? As wealth is created, to whom will it be distributed, when there is no longer labor as a badge of the deserving?
Remember that Orwwell (1984) explained that the work to produce useless and wasteful goods (weapons for perpetual war) was the mechanism by which the elite classes kept the lower classes poor and busy.
Never. For one thing, I don’t believe you could just stop it without fundamentally altering what it means to be human. I also think that if you tried, humans would then focus on other things that would be worse. Finally, technology is a two edged sword, and while it has certainly done and continues to do substantial harm to the planet it also is the key to potentially saving it and all the remaining species, including ourselves. Halting our progress at any point up to and including where we are today would basically mean we accept extinction for ourselves and every other species sooner rather than later (or perhaps ‘never’).
[snark]Right before the creation of Facebook.[/snark]
[non-snark]I agree with XT: