You make good points and certainly the only constant about the future is that it is sure to be what one does not expect given enough time. In the case of constantly falling job opportunities we nevertheless have problems which are not amenable to traditional solutions and when upheaval occurs trouble follows.
If you agree, what do you see as a viable alternative? Social management by governments tend to head to authoritarian application of what are or were policies once not considered viable. The loss of privacy with great support from many in the name of "security" is an example. Just push the fear button and people will surrender themself eventually.
Naturally we would want to prevent this as you allude to in your last paragraph, but whether the government chooses to realize problems which already exist does not mean they will always be able to do so. Things will likely be left until a "crisis" that can be used for political hay because doing is far less important than being seen to be concerned.
Foresight though? We have no leaders who have that facility I know of.
I have considered several possibilities, not all of them very good.
First, let's examine players like Musk, Gates, et al. They are wildcards. Very powerful wildcards.
The first thing to understand about them is that they have been paying attention to 20th century authoritarians and are learning from their playbook. One critical element of maintaining a lasting dictatorship/oligarchy back then was information control; a major subset of that was controlling education.
If you can control education, you can alter how your people will react to information for generations.
We can already see how major "information age" companies like MS and Google want to manipulate the education system. Overtly it appears that they want something relatively simple, such as to reduce the market value of IT/programming talent by encouraging market saturation in STEM/STEAM fields. Covertly I expect that someone, somewhere managing their programs understands that in the future, they'll have to figure out how to mine top talent from classes of people with wildly disparate economic advantages - the poor to the ultra-rich.
Future "big money players" will need access to the best of the best of humanity in every country of the planet regardless of background. They need those people to have a "fair" shot at an education since those who live in poverty with no childhood education may never reach their full potential. MS, Google, etc. want that 1-2% of humanity that falls into the "genius" category. They want to further sift through those folks to get access to those who have the right combination of talent, ambition, and drive to make the future happen.
Big money players also want fungibility of lesser HR assets. They wanted stuff like the TPP to facilitate ease of moving labor across borders without visas or other hassles. Stuff like H1B is just the beginning. They want corporate citizenships that are basically good all the world over, and they want to be able to move people between countries at-will without the hassle of border checks. For them, sovereignty is an impediment. Expect continued pressure in that direction, once they figure out how to overcome current nationalist movements.
In the long run, I expect this "corporatist" future to wind up similar to what you find in any number of cyberpunk novels, with a few oddball exceptions.
1). Non-employables - people not good for much of anything - may be used as a massive group of focus testers when marketing products aimed at the minority who can still produce income of some sort. Imagine large complexes full of people subdivided into marketing cadres (18-34, 35-49, 50-65, etc) living in fully-branded homes with elcheapo versions of products provided to them attending media events on a regular basis to shill brands in hopes of attracting attention from a few buyers with absurd buying potential. As an added bonus there will probably be a inter-corporate system for mining these people as a talent pool so that anyone who pops up as a child in one of these "branded" communities with talent can be scooped up and groomed for bigger things in much the same fashion as the Soviets once whisked children away to special academies back in the day.
2). Currency either won't be used at all, or will be untrackable crypto. There will be a few standards for transactions between corporate groups, and each corporate group will have its own untrackable crypto internal to its own organization. That will reduce taxability since it will be impossible for governments to trace currency exchange.
3). Large groups of people will be moved around based on the relative cost of their labor versus the average labor cost of the target market. The goal is to drive down labor costs, even when maybe only 20-30% (or less) of the people in any given country can command any income at all.
Applying counterpressure to this future are nationalist groups (they don't like open borders), 20th-century dictatorships/oligarchies that have yet to yield control to big money players (China is the notable exception here), and socialist countries that already have cradle-to-grave meddling in the lives of citizens.
The socialist countries will be "first to go" since their systems of taxation will be short-circuited. Even among those who still pay taxes, you will have a situation where maybe 10% of the population is bankrolling the entire country. Those who pay the bills ultimately call the shots. Democracy can not last long under those conditions.
Nationalist groups will ultimately be compromised from the inside as money starts to corrupt anyone who involves themselves in political systems. You may have local conditions that are hostile to globalization of the economy, but those will ultimately be only speedbumps. Have a look at the Trump administration for several examples of this. How cozy they are with the banks.
China will continue to attempt to keep all economic activity in a sandbox owned and managed from the outside by their own Communist party. Whether or not party officials can be corrupted remains to be seen. Their old guard - along with military sympathizers - will periodically step in to crack the whip and keep money players out of power positions. Remember that they own 30-40% of many corporations, and that they have the ability to arbitrarily redirect corporate activity as they see fit. There will be a massive, constant power struggle at the top. How it plays out is anyone's guess.
Some of what I have said here may seem fantastical or absurd, but again . . . you're talking about large percentages of the populations of "developed" countries quickly suffering reduction in labor market value to the point that they are on par with people from countries like modern Niger or Bangledesh. It will be a huge redirection of economic and political power into the elites that either a). have equity or b). talent. No conspiracy required. It'll happen on its own as a result of market forces and technological advancements.
In a better world, some big-money players would sit down and figure out how to share equity with people so that everyone would have a stake in the future, possibly with the caveat that we'd have to be gutsy enough for to people suffer failure conditions if they screw things up too many times too badly. Maybe limit exactly how much profit someone can expect to extract from a corporation on a per-dollar (or per-unit-of-currency) basis. At the present I see no motion in that direction.
Also I do not expect widespread expansion of socialism or totalitarianism, at least not given the current trends. The nationalists don't have it in them to do that, and everyone has their hand out looking for more money. It's too easy to change people's minds in the right places.
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