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Well none of them want their money and power taken away!
I think I had in mind a 1% consisting of a small class of officials, billionaires, engineers and generals. They're the people who already run the world (engineers excepted), they're vaguely on the same side. They will probably also fight eachother for final dominance - but it makes sense to pick off the weakest parties first.
My core idea is that if people can't do any productive work (mass unemployment) that includes soldiering too.
I can imagine a future where there has been enough production or robots/drones/whatever that any human forces become irrelevant, but it would only be one possible future. Other futures where arming a mass of human auxiliaries can give an edge in any conflict would seem to be more likely to me.
i also feel that this framing of "the 1%" simply exterminating everyone else assumes a lot more sociopathy than actually exists. Leaders throughout history have certainly spent lives freely, but we've hardly ever seen them completely disregard their "lessers". Even the genocidal maniacs like Hitler and Stalin typically just targeted certain groups, not all humanity.
And speaking of Hitler and Stalin, the current crop of dictators would almost certainly count among the 1%, and many of them seem to possess very strong nationalistic streaks. Clearly the likes of Xi and Putin would go to great lengths to protect their wealth and status, but I can't imagine they would completely abandon their countrymen - what's the point of elevating to godhood if there is no one around to worship you? Plus, I'd say that speculation about elite vs masses is much less likely than good old fashioned wars between nations and races, if anything would lead to near extinction.
Well if their lessers had absolutely no recourse, if they couldn't even rebel... then we're dealing with a fundamentally new kind of situation outside of recorded history.
The leadership class doesn't need to exterminate humanity, only seize whatever they need for their immediate warfighting needs. This would be stuff like power plants, fuel, industrial facilities, computing equipment, mines... We need those things too! They're unlikely to democratize their power - power wants to be centralized. No state votes in referendums before they start a war, that opens up all kinds of vulnerabilities and complications. I think that states that hold back from autonomous weapons, states that try to be ethical, sections of elites that don't fully commit to the competition will all fall behind.
I believe that power corrupts, that absolute power corrupts very greatly, if not absolutely. Maybe there are some trustworthy people to hold enormous power - but do you trust that our current systems will put them in charge and that they can defeat more ruthless opponents?
Cloning yourself? Subjugating the rest of humanity and ruling like a god? My prediction encompasses extermination, replacement, subjugation, mass brainwashing, selective genocide, getting tossed in some rinky-dink upload-simulation that's the equivalent of UBI for a penny-pinching posthuman... Everything except true decentralization of power, a world where ordinary people have real agency in their transhuman/posthuman lives, where people get to ask for more than UBI, as OP posits. I think the game was rigged from the start, we're completely fucked.
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