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Notes -
The civil wars will continue until the maximum wage returns to zero.
The problem with "well, it'd finally be a communist society" is that communist societies only work if the proletariat has a [distributed] monopoly on violence (and often they don't, or they lose it, which is why real communism has never been tried). From 1750 to 1900 (and even today, to a point), this was the hand-held firearm, but as soon as that decisively changes you can expect industrial-scale 20th-century style mass murder campaigns to make its triumphant return.
Of course, drones may just as easily not form another shot heard 'round the world, but killbots require highly advanced manufacturing and materials which are extremely capital-intensive. Which is why the average citizen, and in particular the average man, has seen his socio-economic standard of living decline over the last 50 years (hence why he is beholden to endless bureaucracy, the heckler's veto, environmentalism, etc. that didn't exist back when he was needed).
Can anything fix that? Well, maybe you can ask the AI how to build your own personal nuclear deterrent in a cave with a box of scraps (in which case things get very interesting; there may be a time period where haplocide is available at one's fingertips if the technology develops in certain ways)- again, it's not a sure thing that everyone just starts killing each other... just a likelihood.
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