Long before the rise of China and India, the question was raised in the West whether one day we may have to keep our economies humming with a fraction of the work force. It was a natural question to ask at a time when robots and other labour-saving devices, up to then the prerogative of writers of science fiction, were becoming real. And now, with China and the others in the picture, the question has become doubly acute.
The U.K., the birthplace of the industrial revolution, now produces not much more than shoes and television programs. As manufacturing went down, the service sector took its place, so much so that the new British government is embarking on wholesale reforms under the name of The New Society without giving a return to manufacturing any priority at all. In the U.S., there is greater awareness of the need to become competitive again. In France and Germany, manufacturing has not declined to the same extent.
The time has not yet come to contemplate a global division of labour, with the East providing the goods and the U.S. and the U.K. the services. But it may come, in which case we would have an interesting neo-imperialist situation in which the Anglo-Saxons exercise their brains and the Easterners their brains and their muscles.
The fact remains that, for the moment, we have to face the likelihood that many of our unemployed will not have a job to go back to. (A good thing that the work force is shrinking anyway because it is growing older.) If this is true, the state would have to find the means to support many millions, however impossible this may seem at the moment. It would have to do so to prevent blood in the streets.
Non-material considerations would prove vital. Opinion leaders might well be advised to give this possibility some attention now. The concept of work would have to be redefined, to embrace activities beyond those that are paid for or are required for subsistence, such as housework. There is never a shortage of social needs; volunteerism would have to count as work. Sports and leisure activities of all kinds, including the cultivation of the arts, would acquire new significance, and so would the role of the churches.
The area that would require particular attention is education. Our institutions would have to be conditioned to train large sections of the community to enable citizens to engage in intellectual activities for their own sake, and not merely because they are useful.
It may not be altogether absurd to conjecture that it was to serve these purposes that – unwittingly – the social media were invented.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
As I’m sure you remember, your thesis was expounded in almost exactly the same terms by Stafford Beer in his opening keynote address to the Couchiching Conference in 1986, entitled The Future of Work.
How can I forget since both you and Stafford Beer were strongly influenced by the author of a novel on the subject, published in 1973, called The Leisure Riots.
Up to the late fifties few woman worked, therefore the society worked fine with only about half of the population employed. According to life insurance actuaries the world population is going to decrease in 2020. The world economy is based on an ever increasing economy. Maybe we should adjust our thinking and plan ahead where quality of life will be the measure of success.