Just out of curiosity, what do you imagine happening in the "post-peak-office" world?
The "post-peak-paper" world was well known and forecast for decades before it actually happened: people would replace paper documents with electronic documents.
The post-peak-office question is trickier. There's a general feeling that "computers" will replace most jobs, eventually. But then what? Do only some people work, in either a Star Trek utopia or a "Beggars in Spain" dystopia? Do people do something else, that doesn't involve offices?
Right now, while you might argue that automation and productivity gains reduce the need for office work to "get things done", the savings are ultimately just spent on more office work: advertising and the financial sector.
If everyone and every object in the world is connected to the network continuously with high bandwidth, why would they need to visit a building in the middle of a city in order to work with others?
That's a post-office world, and one which will come before our concept of work as the necessary foundation of an existence is eliminated (though on a long enough time frame, that's probably coming too).
I think you're describing a "post-peak-employment" world, not just a "post-peak-office" world. Automation is reducing the need for human labor, and at some point there will simply not be enough jobs to go around. I believe governments will then have to provide a basic income to everyone, whether they have a job or not. People who want more money than that will have to find a way to earn it.
The difference is that those improvements where matched with an unprecedented growth of a relatively wealthy middle class that opened up for the creation of a service sector to take all the laid off workers. There doesn't seem to be any such new sectors being created this time around.
At the end of the day I too am reasonably optimistic, but your comparison the the events of the 19th century are too simplistic.
Those improvements were the cause of the unprecedented growth of a relatively wealthy middle class.
Today? Tea shops, bubble teas. Gourmet kebabs made from organically grown meat. Breakfast bars with 150 varieties of breakfast to choose from and combine in one tasty bowl with hand squeezed udder milk. Weekend breaks in scenic spots with cable cars and a robot serving you breakfast. Local organic wild vegetables cooked in various ways.
Each one of these is true today, employs orders upon orders of mechanization and automation to get the job done, yet exist and are mainstream.
Yet they require human interaction at some critical parts, be it construction, testing, maintenance, on-going quality control, or increase in scope of function.
The comparison with luddites in the 19th century was not simplistic, it was spot-on: the luddites didn't realize the possible growth of the non-land-owning and non-hereditary base of power which, at that time, was sparse and dependent on the favour of classes above.
Those improvements were the cause of the unprecedented growth of a relatively wealthy middle class.
Absolutely.
the luddites didn't realize the possible growth of the non-land-owning and non-hereditary base of power which, at that time, was sparse and dependent on the favour of classes above.
Again, absolutely agree. However I disagree that we can necessarily extrapolate anything useful from that fact. I just don't see it as a given that we'll see the same level of job growth coming out of this bout of "creative destruction" over the next 50 years. As you pointed out even our leisure activities are requiring less and less workers even as their variety might be growing. We're going to have to find a fundamentally new source of employment or the numbers just don't balance out.
But as I said, I'm an optimist at heart and I think we'll be fine, but I also suspect the we have to fundamentally rethink things like the meaning of "full employment" and the nature of the 40 hour work week.
Bear in mind that the definition of "middle class" has changed.
Back then, all business owners were deemed "middle class", including people who own or manage large businesses. The term "upper class" was reserved for nobles and other hereditary landowners.
Nowadays, large business owners are synonymous with "upper class". Nobody would call someone like Warren Buffett or Sumner Redstone "middle class" nowadays, but that term would've been applied to them in the 19th century.
The low wage service sector relied on a pool of higher paid office workers. Think of, say, the restaurants full of low pay service workers clustered around office buildings. Despite all the costs of doing business, they can still eek out a minimal income off the revenue generated by hordes of $100K office workers that vastly outnumber them.
There might be only one restaurant worker per 10 office workers. Probably much less.
So remove the office workers and tell all of them to become busboys. Unfortunately, there being no office workers means no revenue, or at least a 90% drop. Unfortunately you went from 1 dude in the busboy labor pool and 1 busboy job, which works pretty well, to 11 dudes in the busboy labor pool and 1 job (until the revenue crunch hits and it goes to zero). Unfortunately the old busboy who can do no higher level work than being busboy is probably going to be replaced by the most aggressive unemployed MBA former office worker, and in former years the ten office workers paying taxes could afford some unemployment for an unemployed busboy, or even 10 unemployed busboys, but no longer, so its a life of crime ... or revolution, after all there are 9 equally unemployed and unhappy former office workers whom "the system" isn't working for them anymore.
The TLDR is the service sector is not an engine of wealth creation. We can sell each other refinanced mortgages or backrubs or life coaching all day in a circular fashion, but its never going to pay any bills and will grind to a halt soon enough.
The "post-peak-paper" world was well known and forecast for decades before it actually happened: people would replace paper documents with electronic documents.
The post-peak-office question is trickier. There's a general feeling that "computers" will replace most jobs, eventually. But then what? Do only some people work, in either a Star Trek utopia or a "Beggars in Spain" dystopia? Do people do something else, that doesn't involve offices?
Right now, while you might argue that automation and productivity gains reduce the need for office work to "get things done", the savings are ultimately just spent on more office work: advertising and the financial sector.