Technology is enabling fewer people to accomplish more. That said population growth and the proliferation of new products and services has kept pace, so overall employment numbers have not changed much. The industries they are in shifts, but that is not novel.

I do not know where this will balance out. Maybe we will only need 25% of the population working in the traditional sense. Maybe there will always be enough work for people.

There is a fear, though, of massive unemployment and people ending up without money to live. This is very unlikely. Even if we end up in a situation where a large portion of the population does not need to work and the government does not intervene companies still need people to buy their products.

Among other things economic growth has relied on population growth. If a company has two people to sell to instead of one they can double their sales. If, in the case above, 75% of the people who used to be able to buy a company’s product no longer can that company’s sales decline by 75%, a decline any company would be very unlikely to survive.

Companies need consumers. If they no longer put money in consumers’ hands by employing them then they need to ensure money is put in consumers hands in another way. Companies will only cease to employ people if it is cheaper to replace them with machines and give them money to continue to buy their products, or to replace them with machines and lose those consumers.

The only problem is if companies fail to realize this and act on it, but I think that is unlikely since there are many people smarter than me spending a lot more time thinking about the economic future.

This corporation run world is unlikely to be an easy transition, or wonderful place to live, but companies cannot survive leaving all of their customers in the lurch.