I've got a better idea that's actually relevant. You tell us what jobs you expect to exist when nearly all manufacturing and services labour is automated.

Maybe you missed the part about there being no jobs ?

We are already a mostly service economy [...]

Yeah. And how has that worked out again ?

For example, under a policy originally introduced during the Franco era, a company must pay a laid-off long-term worker 1.5 months of salary for every year he's been employed at the company. (If he's been there for 8 years, the company must pay him a full year's salary as severance pay.) Especially during the downturn, that policy has made companies loath to hire employees on anything other than temp contracts, contributing to Spain's massive 50% unemployment rate for workers under 26.
Your reasoning is completely arse about face. A policy like that should discourage companies from firing people, not hiring them (unless, of course, they are planning to fire them in the future).
In any event, this is not a policy that impacts "flexibility", it's just an operating expense (ie: you tack another 1.5 months worth of salary onto your costs for hiring an employee).

And when there is no work to be done, what do you propose all those people should do ?

Very, very few people are unemployed because they want to be.

Windows NT did not exist when OS/2 was being developed.
Yes it did. Windows NT development started in 1988, and was being worked on alongside OS/2 1.x.
Microsoft started it because they did not like working on OS/2 yet losing full control over it.
No, Microsoft and IBM agreed to work on OS/2 NT _together_ as a replacement (long term) for OS/2.
But it wasn't. At the time of release OS/2 was only adopted on small servers (as an alternative to Netware, but also for purposes that otherwise required Unix or mainframe) and semi-embedded devices (as an alternative to DOS). On desktops, Windows 3.1 - 3.11 was so entrenched, nothing was capable of displacing it.
OS/2 was primarily for clients, not servers, especially in the 1.x and 2.x days. NT was going to be the server.
I remember all this fairly well because I watched it unfold. Even the wiki pages cover most of the high level stuff, however.

OS/2 was promoted for very large enterprises and competed with Unix, mainframes (from the same IBM), etc. on the server side, and in "thick embedded" devices.

Rubbish. Originally (ie: pre-IBM/Microsoft breakup):

Windows NT (OS/2 NT at the time) was designed and built to compete with UNIX and Netware.

OS/2 was going to be the high-end (ie: "business") user desktop.

DOS+Windows was going to be the low-end (ie: "home") user desktop.

If I get stuck in a traffic jam that I could have found out about on the radio (had I been manually driving), I'd be pretty pissed off.

1. Not driving does not prevent you from listening to the radio and telling the car to avoid a specific area.
2. Even cheap GPSes these days will receive and account for automated traffic reports.

No system can yet match a human driver’s ability to respond to the unexpected, and sudden failure could be catastrophic at high speed.

I'd lay down a hundred bucks in a second that "the system" will respond to "the unexpected" far more successfully than the majority of human drivers.

And we all know all forms of central planning always fail at everything. That's why centrally planned, hierarchical organisations like religions, corporations and military forces have never been successful at anything.

I don't have a Windows 7 machine in front of me to check, but I can't recall any ambiguity about whether or not a program is running. The icon changes to indicate the status.
Of course, I haven't really cared about whether or not programs are running for 15+ years, even since I've had OSes with (varying levels of) competent process scheduling and virtual memory management. Nor should anyone else today, when 2/4 HT-core machines with 2-4GB of RAM and SSDs mundane.

Because that one corner case, trivially dealt with simply by moving the gearshift or hitting the flappy paddle a few times, invalidates the other 99% of usage.

There's a reason clutch pedals are disappearing from race cars.
The only reason they've stayed around this long is because of artificial rules.
Computers have been able to shift gears better than humans for a decade or more.

Windows from version /386 has handled hardware drivers, process scheduling, memory management and user interface.

Pretty much any OS textbook will identify these as the things an operating system does.

Can you be a little more specific ? I've been using Windows 7 for quite some time on multi-monitor setups and don't see anything that's changed with Alt+Tab behaviour.