We are approaching the point where manufacturing will no longer be profitable when using humans. Since corporations are profit-driven organizations they will
1) Use technology to replace people any time they can, and
2) When needing to use humans they will use the least expensive one they can find.
Where does this lead? A single robot factory; owned by one man; who shuts it down because no one will have a job to make money to buy anything. How do we avoid that future?
This is one of the most important challenges we face. The labor which the average worker is able to supply is, and will continue to be, less needed as time goes by.
Even without monetary incentive, people will do things - because everyone including themselves benefits. Even in a crisis where strangers are thrown together, they don't just sit around and refuse to do anything (with exceptions, of course). People organize and perform tasks so that they all can survive, everyone concerned, most of all with his own welfare.
The factory owner wouldn't decide to quit an easy job, perhaps causing more people to shut their factories in imitation, everyone losing the benefits of the products. And if he did, someone else would step in to take his place before that happened. In a too-easy world, people might stand in line for the chance to have a factory to run.
On one hand, what looks like trouble is actually a gift; machines increasingly make things more easily than humans, who can purchase those products for less real money value than previously, and so the customers need to work less in order to get the basics they need.
The optimist would see a future in which we're all doing little, or just a token amount, of work, while also perhaps volunteering at something, and pursuing our own interests the rest of the time. But human nature being what it is, those having just plenty of everything, as opposed to as much as the future "1%", may still be unsatisfied and cause trouble.
Or on the other hand they may be so well entertained with gizmos that they won't cause problems.
It is interesting that we currently haven't recognized how much cheaper many of our everyday goods are, everyone is worried about being booted from having the same 40 hours of paid workweek that they had 20 years ago, but how much did, say, a computer cost then?
The future is less work intensive, and we'll eventually realize that's a good thing. Then we'll have to start learning how to strive at set tasks less, and live well with one another more - something we can use a lot of practice at. Maybe electronics will keep us physically separated enough that we won't tear one another apart from boredom.