A New Social Contract

We are in the early stages of a long-term shift from mass labor to highly skilled elite labor, accompanied by increasing automation in the production of goods and the delivery of services. Workerless factories and virtual companies loom on the horizon. While the emerging knowledge sector and new markets abroad will create some new jobs, these will be too few to absorb the millions of workers displaced by new technologies in the manufacturing and service sectors. Although unemployment is still relatively low, it can be expected to climb steadily and inexorably as the global economy catapults into the Information Age over the course of the next half century. Every nation will have to grapple with the question of what to do with the millions of people whose labor is needed less, or not at all, in an ever more automated global economy.