[cryptonector]

As long as the pace of automation does not exceed some max rate that people can't figure out what to do with the excess labor, we should be ok.

Though I suppose it's always possible that we'll reach something of a "singularity" where we enter the realm of The Phools, by Stanislaw Lem. I can't find a copy of it online, so you might just have to buy the book in which that short story appears.

Briefly and to spoil it: In the story there is a planet with human-like people called Phools and a very stratified, hyper-capitalistic society with three classes, workers, priests, and owners, and someone invents computer that fully automates all factories which then causes 100% unemployment among the workers who then start starving to death. In the story the owners and priests ask the inventor to ask the computer to come up with a solution. You can imagine what the computer came up with... At the end the traveler screams at them something like "Phools! All you had to do was redistribute your income!".

Today -and on this planet- there are certainly a few people today who speak of "useless eaters" and who would like the outcome from that short story. And I can imagine that happening almost naturally. Already fertility rates are crashing worldwide, and we're on a path towards a crashing human population worldwide, and if that happens naturally then I think it means that humans respond to price and other signals and adjust their family planning accordingly, and that would not be a bad thing. Pray though that it's not like in The Phools where the population crashed in a much more dramatic and speedy way, and not at all naturally.