Liberal Forum

"social benefits of employment. Work provides identity, structure, and purpose, not just income"

- Modern corporate life seems to drain away the "social benefits of employment".  In fact most corporations seem to go out of their way to destroy meaning and satisfaction in work.

"AI and robotics are capital-intensive industries themselves, generating sustained demand for maintenance technicians, fleet managers, training data specialists, and deployment engineers"

If your thesis is correct, all these "new" jobs can also be performed by robots.

"The companies that survive the transition are the ones that both reduce labor costs and retain the purchasing power of their customer base"

There is not a company or CEO level employee in the universe that concerns himself with "retaining the purchasing power of their customer base"

"But abundance distributed through ownership"

Ownership comes through deployment of capital.  Capital comes from savings extracted from work,  inheritance or trading.  How will young people accumulate the capital needed to be owners ? 

Many will inherit I suppose, but how many generations will it take for that inheritance to be dissipated ?

There is a fundamental contradiction in the whole "age of abundance" dream.  There is "Now" and  that glorious "Endpoint", but no path through the transition from "Now" to "Endpoint".