Soon we're going to be seeing low-skill jobs go almost entirely to machines, while higher-skill work gets more and more levered up. I expect at the pace we're going (on both technology and economy), that will happen before we ever recover from the current crisis. A large percentage of workers are not going to have much to offer, economically, and I'm not sure where we go from there.
I wonder about this all the time. My primary interest is in fields like Computer Vision, with an ultimate goal of contributing to the self driving car scene. As excited as I am by that and want to see that future as a reality, there's a side of me that wonders what the workforce will do as automated system continue their steady march forward. Once we 'automate away' driving, things like truck drivers (of which there are 3.5 million) will be a thing of the past, probably cabs too given enough time.
Where do they go?
All these things are completely free and not staffed by any humans... because the billionaires who live in cities in the sky feel guilty about the pathetic insignificant lives of the idiot masses below. So we give them the necessities they need, and poison their food so they don't procreate too much.
The other alternative is government spending, a.k.a. stimulus. If we start working on improving our national infrastructure, those projects could result in a lot of jobs.
Often times, the conversation revolves around the fact that the software we sell makes the average worker so ridiculously productive that often times they start being able to do the work of two people. They no longer have to spend time searching for important documents or worry about replacing lost/damaged ones, or pushing paper documents from one department to the other, or waiting for a certain supervisor to come back from a business trip so that they can sign off on stuff. For most knowledge workers this translates to at least a couple of hours of productivity gains everyday, if not more.
What do businesses do with these productivity gains? From what we have seen, the overwhelming majority use the opportunity to lay off workers they no longer need. The reason is simple: their company addresses a certain amount of customer demand, and if they can meet that demand with half the workforce then why not lay off the rest and become more profitable?
Over the years, this phenomenon has led me to the conclusion that the main problem with the economy is lack of consumer demand. If consumer demand was increasing, then companies would hire more employees despite the efficiency gains they get from automation. Or, at the very least, they would be less prone to lay people off, because their existing workforce would be more able to handle the demand by becoming more productive.
Traditionally, the main source of consumer demand in America has been the middle-class. If we find a way to bring that back, everybody wins.