No. The same thing will happen that happened after the Industrial Revolution: People will have jobs but they won't take so much time out of their lives. Furthermore, people will have jobs doing things that aren't considered "work" today, and in fact many of them will have jobs doing things that we can't even imagine today.
Since the Agricultural Revolution (the early years of the Neolithic Era) for more than eleven thousand years right up into the Industrial Revolution (the early years of the Industrial Era), more than 99.9% of the people on this planet worked as food producers (farmers and herders) or food distributors (refining, butchering, carrying, packaging, selling it, etc.). This was a brutal occupation that required working 100 hours per week, even after the domestication of draft animals and the invention of iron plows.
Industrialization mechanized much of the labor that went into food production and distribution. Did this mean that hundreds of millions of people became unemployed? No! For starters, it meant that they no longer had to work hundred-hour weeks. Today in the industrialized world farmers work roughly 40 hours per week like everyone else. But more importantly, only 3-6% (depending on how you identify certain jobs) of the population now works in food production and distribution.
What do the rest of those people do for a living? The answer is that they do jobs that
no one in the pre-industrial era could have even imagined. They build all that equipment that makes farmers' lives easier. They build houses six or eight times larger than anyone except the lords and ladies lived in in the old days. They teach
every child in the developed world reading, history, math, science, sports, music, and many other things that only the children of aristocrats could learn before the printing press was invented. They build roads for vehicles that travel farther in an hour than our ancestors could travel in a week--and they build those vehicles. They build communication devices that even we don't understand very well, and millions of them produce news, entertainment and educational programming for those devices, as well as the software that runs them. They build furniture that only kings had. They make meals that we can stop and pick up on our way home from work. They fix our plumbing and our appliances. ("What do those words mean, 18th-century Daddy?") They run travel agencies, fitness centers, pet shops, and myriad other businesses whose purposes the people of 300 years ago could not comprehend. They use science and engineering to prevent illness and to treat us when we get sick.
Again, I stress that if you had told someone in 1750 that one day it would only take an hour of human labor to feed a human being for a week, he would gasp and say, "Omigod, that means there won't be any work for 99% of the population so they'll all starve to death!"
This is what you guys are telling yourself and telling each other: that because the jobs our grandparents, our parents, and we ourselves are accustomed to doing have become highly automated,
no other jobs will come into existence for us to do.
Now look back about 300 years and tell me you don't feel a little bit foolish about saying that.
I've spent my entire working life doing a job that no one foresaw when I was born, a mere couple of decades before I launched my career: programming computers. (Well okay now I write the manuals for the users of the software but certainly nobody foresaw that either.) Thomas Watson, president of IBM, said that the human race's total demand for computers would amount to less than one hundred of the devices.
He died in 1956. How blessedly lucky. He never had to face a stream of reporters asking him how silly he felt for saying that.
So, which of you wants to be the next Tom Watson?
You'll be doing a job that takes ten hours a week, your family will have a nice house on a large plot of land (since you'll be telecommuting and won't have to live in a city unless, like me, you like cities--and also because we now know that the world population will peak in 80-90 years and start falling, so the quadrillions of people crammed together like sardines that the doomsayers predicted isn't really going to happen). I don't know what you'll spend those ten hours a week doing, and you don't either. But it may be as enjoyable, challenging and rewarding as writing computer programs has been for me. Now excuse me, I have to go to one of those fitness centers because my job is too easy.
