I see your point. I’m not sure what is, or if there is, a good answer to it. It’s certainly a difficult and important question to ponder.
WE are facing a situation here that is utterly without precedent in human history. And nobody is talking about it. Liberals want redistribution of wealth, and conservatives assume the free market will continue to handle the situation adequately, as it has for the last 200 years.
What if they’re both wrong? What if we’re headed for an extremely productive and therefore wealthy society, but one which requires very few people to keep it running, in an economic sense? What does everybody else do?
I also suggest that we have been subconciously addressing the issue for decades. What else would you call the explosion in administrative jobs, regulations, diversity counseling, and other jobs that have little or nothing to do with actually generating products or services people want to buy? This is primarily but not exclusively a government issue.
This issue was very presciently addressed about 20 years ago by the authors of The Bell Curve. It was about how to deal with those for whom society has no economic role.
Since it did not gloss over the fact that a disproportionate number of those who will be most affected are ethnic minorities, the book and its authors were pilloried as racist, and the actual questions it posed were ignored. As they still are.