Homeless retirement is the alternative. In fact it was my likeliest future until a just a few years ago.
I currently live with my 4 adult sons. In our 4-income economy, it's the only way each of us can stay housed.
Voters want more of everything, and our systems encourage everyone within the system to want more.
We don't vote for reducing budgets, and politicians who try to economize get wasted. Everybody wants unlimited health services and the compromise we all select is to increase various tax takes.
Note everybody in the developed world is given relatively similar amounts of time. Yet most of us value our time poorly, since it is a resource we cannot replace.
‡ 90% taxation sounds silly, but it is closer to the truth than looking at $ or working hours. It is hard to choose what to measure - perhaps quality of life or alternatively (total disposable hours versus total waking hours). And choosing the basis of what is a fair amount of resources one person should receive is completely intractable.
This hype, this AI-does-all-humanity's-work-for-us pipe dream relies on an extrapolation to infinity: where at that extreme, somehow AI is the solution to like, perpetual motion or something. Living is a zero-sum game; someone has to do the work. And if the people doing the work isn't "we", and it isn't AI, then what is that called?
...These longterm forecasts are useless.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
Not future political and economic policy.
Through diplomacy it could be decided by future generations they aren't paying off the tab accrued by then long dead Boomers and Big Tech Bro billionaire GenXers, wipe it all out with a debt jubilee.
And the pensions mentioned in the article are an example of this. It mentions that two workers supporting each pensioner is a problem. How? If that’s the case wouldn’t these two workers eventually need four workers to support them as pensioners? What makes this different from a Ponzi scheme?
As someone who has legitimately tried to save enough for my retirement, it is obvious that my savings will be taken away through government taxation changes (the "tax the rich" movement will insidiously spread to taxing middle class savers in New Zealand). The government can't afford to pay for retirees so it will grab resources from whoever has them which I expect to be the "savers" you mention.
An economy can reduce spending on retirees, and increasing the retirement age is the most convenient way to do that.
The proper way out is to increase the productivity of the economy.
Perhaps you are not acquainted with the common retirees that are skimping on all expenses - trivial things like enough heating or food. I have a retiree friend living in his car (and still working hard).
Signal propagation through a populace is physical scaling problem. A future pandemic here, populist revolt there; long dead dear leaders efforts fall apart.
See the end of New Deal as that generation died off. So my point stands the content of future political discourse and economic policy matters; despite billions more people in India and China in the 1960s, they were not chanting "we choose to go to the moon".
They were far more tribal societies back then. See America becoming more tribal and norms falling apart.
Will keep relying in my first hand experience engineering hardware, seeing with my own eyes how difficult stable signal propagation is.