I've thought about this, and just as the turn of the 20th century idealists envisioned a life of leisure for people coming up and were quite wrong, the answer is, that as people become more expensive than they are productive, it's likely the powerful will have policies one way or another that would greatly reduce the population, leaving more for themselves.
That, rather than some utopia like' The Jetsons' with a large population all enjoying the leisure.
In fact, the two-income household becoming the norm in the second half of the 20th century, while a reported one in five households had at least one full-time domestic employee in 1900 as poor as it was with an average $10,000 income adjusted for inflation, says how we're going the other direction as technology increases.
What we DO have is a golden age for the very rich, who are siphoning off wealth and concentrating it in their own hands like rarely if ever before.
The question is whether with such automation we'd have a liberal approach ensuring all humanity benefits, or a conservative one leading to increased tyranny.
I suspect the latter. I don't think Americans quite understand how precarious their position is, as they have become very expensive spoiled brats, who once were coddled as the US milked much of the rest of the world, as they were the engine for the economic and military machine, but now are more an expense the rich can drain.
As much as we like to criticize political leaders, are any as bad as the voters, who support the latest slogan and oppose the latest trivial 'scandal', and are led around by the nose by the propaganda industry, oblivious to how they keep supporting 'phony' representatives of the powerful, unable to recognize how they're exploited?
The government in theory in a champion of the interests of the broad public against the few powerful, but even as the few powerful undermine democracy, the people blame 'the government' rather than the real problems such as allowing the excess concentration of wealth that guarantees many problems for the public.
The public has forgotten that if wants a share of the growth, it has to fight for it.
Look at the mansions a century ago of the Hearsts, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Gettys, in contrast to the shanties of many workers, for an example how all this new 'wealth' is handled, if the people don't prevent that; and look at how much more evenly society progressed in the liberal era from FDR to LBJ.
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