The number of jobs, especially menial jobs, has been and continues to be decreased by advances in technology. Work that used to require people can now be done more efficiently by machines and that trend continues.
It's a pretty fantasy to pretend that everyone can have work they like and are good at and all they have to do to get it is a try a little, but this is reality, not Star Trek. That's not what happens. There are far fewer jobs like that than there are people and most people don't have the required abilities anyway. Me? I'd like to be a physicist and discover some previously unknown knowledge. But that's not going to happen under any circumstances because I don't have the abilities required.
The trend will move up the employment hierarchy over time, partly due to improvements in technology resulting in cheaper, more versatile machines and partly as social norms change to incorporate more technology. I'll use myself as an example. I work in a bingo club. Almost all the work comes down to cash handling and customer service. It would be possible even with today's technology to replace almost all of it by going cashless. The only staff you'd need would be security and some mobile technicians to service and repair machines. That would remove the need for club managers - an example of the trend moving up the hierarchy. The reason it hasn't been done already is social norms - customers expect to be served by people. That's changing as people grow up increasingly used to computers and other machinery doing increasingly more, e.g. self-service tills in supermarkets.
So how do we structure society to function with a reduced level of employment? What do we do when the number of jobs is only 80% of the number of adults? 50%? 20%?
It's a pretty fantasy to pretend that everyone can have work they like and are good at and all they have to do to get it is a try a little, but this is reality, not Star Trek. That's not what happens. There are far fewer jobs like that than there are people and most people don't have the required abilities anyway. Me? I'd like to be a physicist and discover some previously unknown knowledge. But that's not going to happen under any circumstances because I don't have the abilities required.
The trend will move up the employment hierarchy over time, partly due to improvements in technology resulting in cheaper, more versatile machines and partly as social norms change to incorporate more technology. I'll use myself as an example. I work in a bingo club. Almost all the work comes down to cash handling and customer service. It would be possible even with today's technology to replace almost all of it by going cashless. The only staff you'd need would be security and some mobile technicians to service and repair machines. That would remove the need for club managers - an example of the trend moving up the hierarchy. The reason it hasn't been done already is social norms - customers expect to be served by people. That's changing as people grow up increasingly used to computers and other machinery doing increasingly more, e.g. self-service tills in supermarkets.
So how do we structure society to function with a reduced level of employment? What do we do when the number of jobs is only 80% of the number of adults? 50%? 20%?