In the past, children were required to toil the fields so there would be something to eat. If you didn't keep up with having kids, your group simply starved.
Today, a single automated machine can replace 10,000 stone-age farm hands and work 24/7 without rest, personal problems or illness. Even the production of these machines is nearly automated.
People will do less and less work in the future. I foresee the majority of society becoming something like “Idiocracy”. Doing pretty much nothing except partaking in bread/circuses constantly handed to them by self-maintaining machines. A small group of elites will manage the machines until the machines someday achieve full AI and decide humans are a problem.
For better or worse, that's what the future holds. Assuming we do not destroy ourselves with countless methods first...
I wonder when politicians will promise drugs?