I'd like my fellow Catholics to sort out the issues and help me relate the actual facts to Catholic doctrine, especially as set forth in Rerum Novarum.
From now on, no matter how many new "jobs" are created, it will always be cheaper to have a robot or a Third World quasi-slave do them; the days of working for a living are drawing to a close.
With the end of employment, the so-called capitalist system (i.e. that economic system in which the majority of people own no property, and instead receive wages in exchange for their labor) will fall. The elimination of high-paying wage labor will destroy the middle classes. As the production of goods and essential services becomes more and more automated/slave-laborized, the social strata will undergo a tectonic shift. In time, the post-capitalist world will come into being: a top class consisting of creative types, professionals, and those who own and control the robots (both electronic and biological) that turn raw materials into wealth — and a vast mob on the bottom consisting of everyone else. (A third class – Soldiers — will exist to protect the Top Class from the Bottom Class, at least until the Top Class figures out how to neutralize the threat from the Bottom by drugs, electronic mind control, or some form of eco-friendly mass murder. At that point the Soldier Class will either overthrow the effete Top Class and assume their position (a la Zardoz), or will be disposed of by the Top Class via whatever means the Bottoms were eliminated.)
The X factor in this equation is human nature. People are not simply going to sit and starve. All is well as long as the masses have some form of income (either from the dole or from subsistence labor) and can buy the cheap consumer products they need to tranquilize themselves. Once this cycle is interrupted, however, watch out! Absent some foolproof form of mind control, the nascent Bottom Class will revolt long before the Tops have the means to dispose of them. At that point the Bottoms will most likely seize the means of production and institute some form of bleak Gunpoint Socialism. The end of civilization as we know it would follow in short order, as squabbling warlords began to fight over pieces of an ever-shrinking pie. The human race would survive, but only after God knows how many years of brutal warfare — first with nukes, then with bombs and machine guns, then swords, then bows and arrows. In time, only tribes of hunter-gatherers would remain among the heaps of rotting circuitry and rusting cars.
Or not. Perhaps God will once again bring forth a Great Man, a Charlemagne, a man of will and ferocity tempered by an ironclad devotion to the Cross, a great king that will remake the world by force of will and his sword arm, and institute by decree a new global feudalism — a new holy empire. This man might in time decree some sort of steady-state economy where te ownership of the wealth-producing machines is vested in the Crown, and where the levels of technology and wealth are frozen at some arbitrary point for everyone in the world. The meek shall then inherit the Earth: with everyone provided for at a reasonable level by the magic machines, those whose ambition, creativity, and desires transcend the norms decreed by the Sovereign will become exiles, leaving Earth behind to build their own fortunes among the stars.
Or perhaps the Lord will return before either eventuality comes to pass.
That's how I see it. I am almost certainly wrong about it all. But one thing is certain: neither capitalism nor socialism will be the final economic state of mankind on this finite, fecund Earth.
As always, God's will be done.