I am increasingly skeptical of people who claim that technology is going to "deliver enormous benefits". I feel that this model of socioeconomics creates a large number of unexplainable (under the model) anomalies, such as the fact that half of Europe and many American cities seem to be in absolute decline, in spite of having about as much technology as the rest of the world, or the fact that places like Hong Kong and Singapore are astoundingly rich and successful, in spite of not having any special technological proclivity.
My model now is that socioeconomic well-being is a function of several factors. Technology is a factor with a relatively small weight. Institutional quality is a far more important factor. My view of the US is that we've experienced a rapid uptake in technology alongside serious decline in institutional quality, and these two effects have more or less cancelled each other out, so that the well-being of people in the US is about unchanged over the last 1-2 decades.
To elaborate on this point, consider that the aggregate market cap of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, and Facebook is about 1.5e12 dollars. Conservative estimates for the cost of the US war on terror since 2001 is about the same. It's not an exact comparison, but it's an order of magnitude sanity check on my claim that wealth increase due to technological advance is on the same order of magnitude as wealth decrease due to institutional failure.
There's a long article in this week's The Economist:
The onrushing wave
discussing the effect of changing technology upon the amount of employment available in different sectors of the economy.
Sample paragraph from it:
(There's a summary online of their previous book: Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy)
What do people think are society's practical options for coping with this change?