Yea standard of living has increased. Can't you want olden-days level of healthcare, accomodation, food, etc. but less work?

People don't need to do much work to survive. They choose to because they want to play the rat-race. They want to compete with each other for status and wealth. And that's a good thing - it's what drives all the productivity that enables easy-goers to live off grid or in a tent or renting in a cheap neighborhood doing just a little part-time work.

Misleading graph alert! The green graph's vertical axis starts at 150,000 instead of 0. It shows the number falling to about 50%, not 10% as it appear at first. The misleadingness fits the author's narrative, which is how it always seems to go so I think it's safe to assume malice and that he's trying to mislead his readers.

Exactly, it's the police's fault, as well as the wider system they operate in that enables that kind of abuse, and they do it anyway even with out AI.

If there's so little data that you can fit it in photo albums, this is all moot because you can literally just store them in printed form on paper which will easily last a lifetime. Flash is what you might be tempted to use for 10s-100s if GB, including videos.