Earlier quoted context omitted.
>maybe betting against human lives doesn’t feel right This is an inappropriate emotional appeal. Real estate is dependent upon the price/value of labor. It's betting for/against labor prices. Labor is not your life. You are more than your job.
Warning, uncomfortable honesty ahead. I'd be betting against labor. With all the automation going on, and the "Huge" technological advancements I foresee probably Of course, I won't step on others, and I'll help where my conscience requires me. But at the end of the day (or the end of the world) I am here to provide a safe future for my children, and perhaps secondary, my culture's children... but definitely not to s…
In the world you're describing, they're not just possible, they're inevitable.
Consider the implications of automation taken to the extreme. Today, we have capitalists who own the means of production, and workers who use them to produce value. Workers don't get a fair slice of the pie that they make, but they get some of it at least because labor is needed for capital to be useful. The system is unfair overall and popularly perceived as such, but most people aren't pushed far enough that violent revolt would be rational and feasible.
But if means of production that don't require workers to operate them become dominant, and lots of workers become outright economically redundant, it will literally be a question of what do their children eat tomorrow. And, well, there's a lot more labor; whatever societal monitoring and control tech you devise, it won't help you if 90% of the population realize that the only way they won't starve is if they forcibly take what the other 10% has hoarded.
Not only that, but should that happen, the torches-and-pitchforks mob will target the people on the bottom of the upper class first, simply because they are more prominent in day-to-day interactions, live closer, can afford less security, and don't have ready access to escape routes (like a private plane or yacht). For some vivid descriptions of how this works out for the people who can't escape, read about the 1917 Russian revolution.
So unless you're already comfortably upper class - enough so to afford a bunker in New Zealand or similar arrangements - this doesn't sound like a good long-term survival strategy to me. Indeed, I would argue that, among white collar workers, it's precisely the high middle class people that have the most vested interest in "saving the world", in a sense of coming up with a new economic consensus that would prevent the above scenario - we have to, if we want a safe future for our families. And I don't think it is at all impossible for a political alliance of all labor across the board to push this change. Our societies are bad at democracy, generally speaking, but supermajorities still matter.