Comment Re:André Gorz (Score 3, Informative) 586
Rises in productivity due to automation are incompatible with a culture that values 'work' on a moral basis, and associates it with a persons identity.
This is the critical thing, in much the same way that decoupling wealth and power from land ownership during the Industrial Revolution was incompatible with a culture that valued landed estates on a moral basis, and associated them with a person's identity (at least for the gentry, who were after all the only people who counted as "people", back in the day.)
It took something closer to centuries than decades for a relatively small and educated class to come to terms with that (my Scotish friends tell me England is still struggling with it.)
Today, we have a system of distribution of benefits from social producitivity [*] that depends on "work", while automation is rapidly eliminating jobs while maintaining productivity (and therefore profits for owners.)
It is of course completely indeterminate how this is going to end, but we can be pretty sure that a hundred years from now the status quo of the past century in which paid corporate employment has been the common basis for the distribution of wealth, won't be the norm, and more than the leasehold farming and villiage life that was the norm in England in 1750 much resembled the average English life in 1850 (Male Employment in Agriculture/Industry = 1760: 52.8%/23.8%; 1840: 28.6%/47.3%).
[*] if you don't think social goods like the rule of law in general and the Companies Act in particular are absolutely necessary, though admittedly not sufficient, for "private" corporations to exist, much less thrive, you might be a libertarian lunatic