#2 Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created?

So, if half of today’s jobs disappear, will they be replaced by new types of jobs?  Expert are split down the middle on this.

http://www.elon.edu/e-web/imagining/surveys/2014_survey/2025_Internet_AI_Robotics.xhtml

Robotic and AI experts participated in answering an eight-question survey fielded by Elon University and the Pew Internet Project from late November 2013 through early January 2014. Some 1,896 experts responded to the following question:

The economic impact of robotic advances and AI – Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025?

Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order. Their arguments are:

• Displacement of workers from automation is already happening—and about to get much worse
• The consequences for income inequality will be profound
• For those who expect AI and robotics to significantly displace human employment, these displacements seem certain to lead to an increase in income inequality, a continued hollowing out of the middle class, and even riots, social unrest, and/or the creation of a permanent, unemployable “underclass”.

The other half of the experts who responded to this survey (52%) expect that technology will not displace more jobs than it creates by 2025. To be sure, this group anticipates that many jobs currently performed by humans will be substantially taken over by robots or digital agents by 2025. But they have faith that human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Their arguments are:

• Throughout history, technology has been a job creator—not a job destroyer 
  (Editor's note:  In the past Technology destroyed labor intensive jobs and created labor intensive jobs. In the future Technology will not create labor intensive jobs, quite the contrary)
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• Advances in technology create new jobs and industries even as they displace some of the older ones
• There are certain jobs that only humans have the capacity to do
• A number of respondents argued that many jobs require uniquely human characteristics such as empathy, creativity, judgment, or critical thinking—and that jobs of this nature will never succumb to widespread automation.
• The technology will not advance enough in the next decade to substantially impact the job market
• Our social, legal, and regulatory structures will minimize the impact on employment

Point of agreement: The education system is doing a poor job of preparing the next generation of workers

• A consistent theme among both groups is that our existing social institutions—especially the educational system—are not up to the challenge of preparing workers for the technology- and robotics-centric nature of employment in the future.

Point of agreement: The concept of “work” may change significantly in the coming decade

• On a more hopeful note, a number of experts expressed a belief that the coming changes will allow us to renegotiate the existing social compact around work and employment.
• Possibility #1: We will experience less drudgery and more leisure time
• Possibility #2: It will free us from the industrial age notion of what a “job” is
• A notable number of experts take it for granted that many of tomorrow’s jobs will be held be robots or digital agents—and express hope that this will inspire us as a society to completely redefine our notions of work and employment.
• Possibility #3: We will see a return to uniquely “human” forms of production
• Another group of experts anticipates that pushback against expanding automation will lead to a revolution in small-scale, artisanal, and handmade modes of production.

Point of agreement: Technology is not destiny…we control the future we will inhabit

• In the end, a number of these experts took pains to note that none of these potential outcomes—from the most utopian to most dystopian—are etched in stone. Although technological advancement often seems to take on a mind of its own, humans are in control of the political, social, and economic systems that will ultimately determine whether the coming wave of technological change has a positive or negative impact on jobs and employment.

#8 More comments from Quora: Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?

Yeah.  I'm not sure it's happening at breakneck speeds right now, but sometime in the next generation it will.  The moment a multi-purpose robot is created that can do most of what humans can physically do, we're in for a lot of trouble.

There just aren't nor will there ever be enough "thinking" or "humans only" jobs out there to occupy the previously displaced individuals.  It's the worst kept secret in recent history that somehow human labor will remain viable for much longer.  One of my key clients has the world "Automation" in its very name and I place about 12 people there a year.  Some are embedded systems developers, some are automation experts.  Every one of them acknowledges that they are literally inventing themselves out of jobs.

I placed an older man (developer) six months ago who said, "We're *this close* to having computers that can do all their own programming themselves.  There may still be human needs to teach them things, but those are small numbers of really high-end jobs.  Most developers will be gone by the mid 20's.  The machines we're making will self-service, self-repair and run with 1/10 as many humans as they do now.

Companies like Walmart and Amazon are already desperately looking to replace their truck loaders.  Most shipping companies (like the former Walmart arm, McClane) will jump at the first self-driving truck that demonstrates a less-than-human average error rate.  This says nothing about a "no error" error rate. 

These things aren't scifi ideas on the horizon.  They are being made right now and all that remains for several are to convince legislatures to begin licensing them.

No, it isn't. It's creating at least as many jobs as it's eliminating. The problem is it's eliminating jobs that don't require much in the way of education, intelligence, or talent and creating ones that require a high level of at least one of those things. Unfortunately, about half of everybody is never going to be able to do those new jobs.

Yes, jobs are disappearing faster than they are being created.  This trend will only increase as technological advances accelerate and compound.

This trend will create rising wealth inequality and social instability which we are already observing today.  Too many people, not enough well paying jobs.  Robots / computer assisted humans produce goods and services cheaper / more efficiently than humans alone.  In a capitalist system robots will win as the companies using technology will dominate in the marketplace as only the most profitable companies survive and grow.  The world's capital is flowing towards automation and away from investing in human labor simply because automation has a better ROI.  This is the tipping point economically speaking.  The point of no return.

In an engineering / technology business sense means you do not have to replace the worker with technology.  You simply have to make the worker more productive with technology, using less workers in total while increasing economic production.  The robot / computer / software works cooperatively with the worker.  So in the end where there used to be 1M jobs, it reduces to 800k then to 500k then to 250k etc ...  over time as technology advances.  All the while the production of goods and services is rising with lower costs.  When economic growth requires less people and jobs year after year you have an insurmountable problem.

This is happening at the present time.  This is why we have a "jobless" recovery.  No one wants to acknowledge the reason why.  The trend of technology replacing virtually every worker destroys the model of capitalism.  Capitalism assumes that economic production chiefly employees people not machines.  Workers derive personal wealth from employment.  When the majority of goods and services are produced by machines without human labor then the capitalist model falls completely apart.

Technology is a chief driver of growing wealth inequality in the USA and the world.  This has created a rich class of owners (the 5% that make and own the technology along with the minority that they employ) and an increasingly poorer class of workers scrambling for an ever decreasing number of low paying service jobs.

In Silicon Valley there is an elite relatively small economic class of ordinary citizens with a large amount of wealth derived solely from automation (also known as productivity technology / disruptive change which is tech speak for doing more output with less workers).

As for the argument that productivity technology only impacts low paying jobs is false.  Automation is first geared precisely towards high paying, high value jobs.  That is where the money and profits reside for automation.  Bill Gates is still the richest person in the world in part because he automated high paid office work with Microsoft office and email.  Yes CPAs, business and finance people use excel as their primary language.  What would take a CPA in the 1960's a month to do can be done in an hour today.  Most financial software automates jobs that accountants performed.

In fact venture capital and invested corporate capital deliberately targets those jobs / industries with the highest costs.  It will likely take a 100 years to maybe 200 years to completely replace most jobs with technology.   It may never fully complete perhaps leaving 1% or 10% of the population having to perform needed tasks (not work per se, not employment per se because these concepts may cease to exist in the post capitalist economic model).

Despite the claims to the contrary it is different this time.  We are not talking about horses, trains, assembly lines, etc ... We are talking about intelligent robots with advanced technology that learn quickly without limit in the end.  Robots are general purpose and will do any job better and faster as time marches on.  Most human work can be automated with certainty given enough time.  As new jobs are created they will be automated in short order as the training process only happens once for all robots.  Unlike humans which have to be individually trained in costly manner, training one robot is effectively training all robots for all of time.  Humans are inefficient in comparison, they die taking most if not all of their knowledge with them.

The future role for money, taxes and traditional jobs may likely not exist as we know it today.  These concepts are predicated on an economic system that will no longer likely exist.

The transition to a jobless economy where only a small number of robot designers are gainfully employed could be extremely problematic.  Rising wealth inequality might be inevitable unless we abandon our 19th century economic concepts and move into the 22nd century economy.

Equal number of new jobs will not be created. In fact, there will be very little job to be done. Don't be scared by this, it is a good thing.

AI that you see today uses Artificial narrow intelligence (ANI). This helps you to do specific set of tasks only. This has opened a whole new set of opportunities for people to work with.

In the near future, it is hoped that Artificial general intelligence (AGI) develops. This is related to human intelligence. This is also very good. Complex hard labor jobs like farming without using pesticides can be easily made a reality. This will surely put many people out of work. But, hey,  the price of commodities can go seriously low once AI is properly automated. Maybe the basic necessities of life will be available for free.

So, the number of people who will be jobless once AGI develops may not be equal to the number of jobs being created due to AGI. But, as I said, it will help humans to relax more and probably make basic necessities available for free.

#7 On what basis will the income generated by the ACT be distributed?

At the most basic level every citizen of the United States would receive say 100 shares in the trust. Newborns would receive 100 shares at birth but held in trust by the trust on till they reach adulthood. If we stopped here it would be a complete disaster. The plan would be nothing more than a disguised welfare system. Giving people money for doing nothing destroys them in the long term. There is no source of self-respect or achievement as previously found in exchanging labor for income. So people have to do something in order to earn this income from the trust.

In essence, the plan needs to establish a way for people to earn more shares based on what they do. One way to think about this is to harken back to the days when some of us might have been in the Boys and Girls Scouts. In that system there was a progressive set of activities which led from newbie Cub Scout to Eagle Scout at the end. Throughout that process individuals in the boys and girls Scouts could earn merit badges in a wide variety of activities the Scout organization considered constructive and character building.

In a similar manner the ACT directors could construct a series of activities ranging from the artistic to the altruistic  that when successfully completed word earn the individual additional shares in the trust. Thus the more ambitious and energetic individuals could pursue a wide variety of structured activities that would allow for their progression up a ladder similar to the progression people could experience in their careers in the past when employment was a viable option. Those who are a little more laid back could be content with just their basic  allocation of shares which would be equivalent perhaps in current dollars to 25 to 30,000 a year.

Who decides how much and for what?

And this is difficult question fraught with political quicksand traps. It is difficult but not impossible to address. A panel of academic, religious, business and political leaders could be convened to determine what these “merit badges” would entail, how to certify their achievement objectively and how many shares they are worth. I'm sure this CBO will be happier get on that one right away.

Implementation

Clearly something like this cannot be implemented 100% overnight. It would need to be started on a very small experimental scale where the trusts that are generated are quite modest as is the quarterly dividend paid to citizens say on the order of a $2000 or $3000 a quarter.  As we move into the rest of the century and if, as many experts believe, jobs will continue to permanently disappear over the next 10 decades, the amount of money raised by the trust and the amount distributed to citizens could then gradually increase in proportion to the degrees in employment opportunities.

Is important to note that under this plan individuals could earn income from two sources. Everyone could earn income as a merit badge. Some individuals could also earn income from regular employment or entrepreneurial activities. A citizen could be a “merit badger” and a producer at the same time if that individual can secure employment, self or otherwise. Under this plan there will still be a fairly wide distribution of incomes among the citizenry depending on their level of energy, aggressiveness, intelligence and luck.

At first it may seem that the people who hold most of the money now, whether they be individuals or corporations, are the losers in this plan. Yes, it is true that we will have to borrow one of Robin of Locksley's old tricks and rob from the rich to give to the not so rich. But this is the only way the rich among us will survive long term. If income from labor all but disappears for the majority of citizens by the end of this century the rich among us will not be able to sell anything to anybody and the system will collapse. If we do a little redistribution in the manner described here it is possible that the economy would grow at a much faster rate and the size of the pie get bigger and bigger for everyone concerned.

Some of us will still get a bigger slice of that pie and frankly I think that is just. What we want to avoid at all costs is the pie shrinking to the size of a penny where no matter how big your slice is, it ain't worth much.

#6 Where will the money to fund the American Citizens Trust come from?

The essential component of the disaster recovery plan than being outlined here is the formation of a American Citizens Trust (ACT). This would be a similar institution to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac which would invest in a basket of companies traded publicly in the stock market. Each citizen of the United States would be a shareholder in this investment trust. The trust would be initially capitalized through one or more of the following options.

•    A revision of the income tax system to reflect a flat rate for every individual.

•    A revision of the corporate tax rate system whereby every corporation with pay a minimum of 20% of revenues regardless of the location in the world where these revenues are realized.

•    A Federal Reserve fundinging structure

Are the tax rate revisions described above the best ones? Further study on this would be required. I contacted the Congressional Budget Office and asked them to research this. They wrote back telling me that they would be delighted to do so as soon as they finish straightening out Washington DC.

(Another option for generating the investment trust is to adopt the American Monetary Act whereby the power to create “Green” money is transferred from private banks to the US Government. http://www.monetary.org/amacolorpamphlet.pdf)

Given that a substantial amount of money could be raised by the vehicles described above, the question then becomes what to do with all this money. The traditional option is to write every citizen a check for whatever amount of money is required to share in the trust equally. I do not favor this approach.

A better approach would be to invest this ACT in a basket of companies, particularly those that are judged to be more advanced in automating their processes. This of course opens up a Pandora's box of political chicanery since it would be up to the directors of the ACT to choose, and thereby perhaps favor, some companies over others.

An alternative to this might be to require the ACT to be invested in all companies in the S&P 500 list in proportion to their size. Other schemes could be developed for ensuring that the ACT is invested in a wide variety of companies in an equitable manner. I'm sure this CBO will be delighted to take this project on also, once they finish straightening up Washington DC of course.

So what do we have so far? A large amount of money will be generated through tax code revisions and federal reserve type investment to be reinvested equitably in a wide variety of American companies. Every American citizen would be a shareholder in this trust and receive quarterly earnings from it. I the next post, we will deal with our second question:

On what basis will the income generated by the ACT be distributed?

#5 A radical plan to deal with chronic (50%) technological unemployment

AMERICAN CITIZENS TRUST

A Disaster Prevention And Recovery Plan

In The Face Of Increasing Technological Unemployment

By Dr. Rafael Haddock, Ph.D.

Background

This document presents a disaster recovery plan which may never have to be implemented. The plan is designed to prevent a disaster if a certain scenario becomes reality as we move into the 21st century. Arguments can be had as to how likely this scenario is. However, even unlikely scenarios benefit from development of contingency plans in case the scenario comes about with disastrous results. The sinking of the Titanic was considered very unlikely scenario. So was the bringing down of the World Trade Center in New York City. And yet…

The Scenario

There is a growing consensus among experts that technological unemployment is a phenomenon that is here to stay. Automation of jobs from the simplest manual labor to many complex analytical tasks are likely to be done by increasingly intelligent machines in the future. Estimates range anywhere from 25% to 50% of all jobs permanently disappearing by 2050. Those who dare think beyond that see a future in which 90% of current jobs disappear. It may be that the Titanic will not sink but we ought to at least have a contingency plan to recover if it does.

The question becomes: can our free enterprise capitalist financial system survive if a significant part of the population has little or no disposable income with which to purchase the goods and services that make the economic machinery work? What happens to consumer demand when 50% plus of the people have no money to spend beyond the simplest and most basic necessities of life?

A Solution

Painful as it may seem at first blush, the solution is to find ways to put disposable income into the hands of a large portion of the population and do so while they remain unemployed in the traditional sense. This then leads to some fundamental questions:

•    Where will the money come from?

•    On what basis is this money distributed to people?

•    Who decides how much and for what?

Future posts will address these questions.

#4 Bad situation at 11% unemployment (the real number). Imagine if that went to 50%.

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5 Facts That Show Half of America Is Seriously Struggling

From: www.alternet.org/economy/5-facts-show-half-america-seriously-struggling

The media celebrates "economic growth," while new data shows most Americans are barely surviving.

Happy Monday! S&P 500 now up 10% for year --CNN Money
Third-quarter U.S. economic growth strongest in 11 years --Reuters
The U.S. economy is on a tear --Wall Street Journal

Half of our nation, by all reasonable estimates of human need, is in poverty. The jubilant headlines above speak for people whose view is distorted by growing financial wealth. The argument for a barely surviving half of America has been made before, but important new data is available to strengthen the case.

1. No Money for Unexpected Bills - A recent Bankrate poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans didn't have savings available to cover a $500 repair bill or a $1,000 emergency room visit. A related Pew survey concluded that over half of U.S. households have less than one month's income in readily available savings, and that ALL their savings -- including retirement funds -- amounted to only about four months of income. And young adults? A negative savings rate, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Before the recession their savings rate was a reasonably healthy 5 percent.

2. 40 Percent Collapse in Household Wealth - Over half of Americans have good reason to feel poor. Between 2007 and 2013 median wealth dropped a shocking 40 percent, leaving the poorest half with negative wealth (because of debt), and a full 60% of households owning, in total, about as much as the nation's 94 richest individuals. People of color fare the worst, with half of black households owning less than $11,000 in total wealth, and Hispanic households less than $14,000. The median net worth for white households is about $142,000.

3. Cost of Living Surges as Income Falls - Official poverty measures are based largely on the food costs of the 1950s. But food costs have doubled since 1978, housing has more than tripled, and college tuition is eleven times higher. The cost of raising a child increased by 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. And despite the gains from Obamacare, health care expenses continue to grow. As all these essential costs have been going up, median household income has been going down since 2000, with the greatest drop occurring since 2009, as 95 percent of the post-recession income gains have gone to the richest 1%.

4. Lots of New Jobs (Below Living Wage) - 'Amazing' jobs report, apart from wages –Marketwatch.  Amazing at the top and at the bottom. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, there have been job gains at the highest paid level -- engineering, finance, computer analysis; and there have been job gains at the lowest paid level -- personal health care, retail, and food preparation. But the jobs that kept the middle class out of poverty -- education, construction, social services, transportation, administration -- have seen a decline since the recession, especially in the northeast. At a national level jobs gained are paying 23 percent less than jobs lost. Worse yet, the lowest paid workers, those in housekeeping and home health care and food service, have seen their wages drop 6 to 8 percent (although wages overall rose about 2 percent in 2014).

5. Our Greatest Shame: Half of the Children Feeling Poverty - Over half of public school students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies. There's been a stunning 70 percent increase since the recession in the number of children on food stamps. State of Working America reported that almost half of black children under the age of six are living in poverty.

The celebratory quotes about a booming economy seem so far away.

#3 A few more comments from "What is the plan"?

The question "What is the plan if a computer or robotic workforce cause catastrophic unemployment?" was raised in an on-line debate forum.  Here are some more comments from this source.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-plan-if-a-computer-or-robotic-workforce-cause-catastrophic-unemployment

I actually think you can find inspiration for this question in Alaska of all places. In Alaska, the state makes so much money that it literally pays people just because they live there.  In a future where corporations made huge amounts of money and employed few, it's reasonable to expect that goods would be extremely cheap and that corporations could be taxed at a high enough rate to pay a dividend to many of the masses such that they could have an okay or good life even if they were unemployed.

But, really what it comes down to is that...(a) the guy who owns all the robots is going to have to admit that he isn't really earning what they produce.  And...(b) we're going to have to come up with a plan for allocating spare resources among those who don't actually earn them. This means that the our choices are going to be widespread welfare or genocide.

Great question and answers. I hesitate to add anything but it seems to me there is an assumption underlying many answers which may not be reliable.The assumption is that governments will be able to redress the concentration of economic power. Voters who elect governments will want redistribution of some significant wealth from robot owners to the rest of us. The robot owners may or may not resist this. If they do resist it, then Government may not have sufficient power or will to prevail against the robot-owning class. Over time there may be a power shift, including militarily, from the Government to the robot owners. I accept this power shift will take a long time but it will start I suspect in the next decade or two. Even now look at the comparative power of corporations v. government compared to a hundred years ago.

I believe therefore that the future will play out like this: As robots develop more and more capabilities the value of labor versus capital will plunge.  At some point if you are not a shareholder, property holder, or sitting on a pile of raw materials, you will be outside the economy.  This will go for doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers, accountants ... basically everyone.  

At this point the justifications for capitalism are just not there.  Capitalism makes sense in this world where humans must provide labor and intelligence to make things.  In today's world the unequal distribution of wealth is justified (or is justified by some at least) because people are contributing disproportionately to production.  In a world where everyone contributes the same amount to production (i.e. ZERO), there isn't really any justification for unequal distribution.  We do need to move away from classic capitalism and implement new ways for humans to obtain basic needs and more importantly free themselves up to contribute more fully without the distractions and waste of commuting to work, and also remove mundane and useless and demotivating jobs.

That's not to say that things will be distributed fairly.  Because they won't be.  People will take the share of output that is proportional to their ownership of capital.  If you don't own shares in some productive (fully automated now) industry, or own land, or own resources, you will legally own nothing.  For the meatbags elsewhere outside the shareholding and landowning population, I suppose Tom Caldwell's answer above is one optimistic possibility, i.e. we all get a permanent retirement with some small fixed share of amenities to keep us alive (although with rapidly accelerating development, these amenities might rapidly go beyond our wildest dreams).

Capitalism is clearly not compatible with a non-human workforce and so whatever we do, short of changing drastically the economic system, will lead to collapse. Such a collapse is not necessarily a bad thing though. The problem is how we avoid the chaos when it happens and how we get out of it. I would like to think that we will all get together and build a system in which the newly expanded wealth is shared between everyone. This is entirely feasible, but this would entail having public means of production (because there won’t be a profit motive for private investors anymore) and a fixed amount of “money” given for free to each citizen (with very different properties from our current money). I think this is possible if the political system existing when the collapse takes place is very democratic (e.g. Swiss-like direct democracy), such that the balance of power between the citizen and those in power is in favor of the citizen. 

We do need to move away from classic capitalism and implement new ways for humans to obtain basic needs and more importantly free themselves up to contribute more fully without the distractions and waste of commuting to work, and also remove mundane and useless and demotivating jobs.

Grants and stipends.   People do lose jobs to computers, and we have  stipends called unemployment insurance.  I would set up an additional program of grants to those affected, based on merit, but structured so most displaced people get them.  This would be decentralized, set up on the Federal, state, local levels and from for-profit companies and non profits. Of course it might be a mess at first, but its better than being too centralized.

#1 The Future of Jobs

What is the plan if a computer or robotic workforce cause catastrophic unemployment?

http://www.gizmag.com/half-of-us-jobs-computerized/29142/

Almost 47 percent of US jobs could be computerized within one or two decades according to a recent study conducted by The University of Oxford's Dr. Michael A. Osborne and Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey of Oxford Martin School that attempts to gauge the growing impact of computers on the job market. It isn't only manual labor jobs that could be affected: The study reveals a trend of computers taking over many cognitive tasks thanks to the availability of big data. It suggests two waves of computerization, with the first substituting computers for people in logistics, transportation, administrative and office support and the second affecting jobs depending on how well engineers crack computing problems associated with human perception, creative and social intelligence.

Source: The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerization? (PDF)

The question above was raised in Quora, an on line debate forum (http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-plan-if-a-computer-or-robotic-workforce-cause-catastrophic-unemployment)  What follows are selected comments from people that responded.

Remember that one of the immutable laws of economics is that actual demand (desire) for goods and services is infinite, regardless of the ability to pay (which is used to measure "positive" demand).  If there's mass unemployment due to consolidation of labor productivity from automation, positive demand would crater as tons of people permanently lose their incomes and earning power.  Where are the capitalists going to find paying customers when those customers are obsolete and broke?

We could see a situation where {oversimplified} 20% of humans are producers/super consumers and drivers of the economy, and the remaining 80% will largely be passive consumers, (their economic value being defunct for one reason or another), whose consumption of super cheap goods and services is subsidized by the 20%.  In fact, this is one of 2 inevitabilities if a huge subset of human labor becomes obsolete.  The other is revolution.

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My belief is that traditional companies, having increased in size from the Industrial Revolution through the late 20th century, are now shrinking into obsolescence, and that in the not-too-distant future there will be few, if any, "jobs" as we know them. Instead, the world will begin to separate into two relatively distinct groups: entrepreneurs on the one hand, and personal producers on the other. The latter category will include all skilled trades and professions, from software engineers to doctors, artists to barbers. Each of these people, however, will be responsible for his or her own career, which will consist of a lifetime series of individual projects coordinated by the entrepreneurs, who will use technology to leverage a truly global, specialized workforce.

The challenge, as I see it, is for the segment of society that is constitutionally, intellectually, or otherwise incapable of being one or the other. If that segment turns out to be relatively manageable (say, under 10-15%), then society will be able to put in place safety nets and other approaches to maintaining balance.  But if it turns out to be much larger (perhaps 50%? More?) then I think we face potentially existential challenges in the mid-term future.

                                                                *********

In a future where corporations made huge amounts of money and employed few, it's reasonable to expect that goods would be extremely cheap and that corporations could be taxed at a high enough rate to pay a dividend to many of the masses such that they could have an okay or good life even if they were unemployed.