At least in the US, the current long-run employment is caused by a severe ongoing recession that's being exacerbated by massive deficit spending, increased regulation and tax hikes. None of this has anything to do with technology one way or the other. While it's true that at some point you could have so much automation that you run out of jobs for people, we're not remotely close to approaching that point yet. Instead we see a few % of current jobs become obsolete each decade, most of which are replaced by new jobs that didn't exist before.
As for profit margins, my point was simply that degree of automation is irrelevant. Profit magins in a given industry are determined by a complex interplay between number of competitors, barriers to entry, regulation and dozens of other factors, none of which are much afected by the details of production. For instance, manufacturing has already seen 1-2 orders of magnitude increase in automation in the last 200 years but their profit margins generally don't show it.
Finally, you won't see people trading work hours for extra leisure unless their pay is already high enough that they'd prefer more free time to more money, which isn't going to happen unless average incomes are at least an order of magnitude higher than they are now. Most people don't start running out of things to spend money on until they have a mansion, several luxury cars and a few $100K of assorted toys, after all.
Mechanical Engineering magazine (paywalled until next month) and Financial Times, among others, recently reviewed the book Race Against the Machine by economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The FT reviewer writes:
And ME magazine quotes McAfee in an interview:
Both reviewers also hint that McAfee and Brynjolfsson offer a partial explanation of the "jobless recovery", but either the book's argument is weak or the reviewers do a poor job summarizing it. Such a purported explanation might be the main attraction for most readers, but I'm more interested in the longer-term picture. Be it the "nightmarish vision" of the future mentioned in FT, or the simpler point about wages offered by McAfee, this might be a good hook to get the general public thinking about the long-term consequences of AI.
Is that a good idea? Should sleeping general publics be left to lie? There seems to be significant reluctance among many LessWrongers to stir the public, but have we ever hashed out the reasons for and against? Please describe any non-obvious reasons on either side.