I'm curious what you think about the world's economic evolution after oil and after robots/AI take more jobs than they create.

We can't know what new industries will arise. At some point, it's likely that AI will automate most repetitive (i.e. middle class) cognitive tasks, and machines will automate or assist much, if not most, manual labor.

Corporate capitalism has, in many cases, elevated standards of living across the globe, but at the cost of using an extractive, exploitative model. Globalisation essentially seeks the lowest standard of living and pays workers as little as necessary until automation/roboticisation can do the job more cheaply.

So what happens after full employment is no longer a practical goal for global economies?

What happens when the idea of "get an education, have a career" is completely disconnected from income potential? Fifty years ago, a high school diploma was a decent basic education; now, high school won't get you very far at all. What happens when the same occurs for university and graduate degrees -- if only because the number of graduates is larger than the number of jobs?

What happens when robots can adequately perform most factory and shipping jobs? If more people are told to re-train, how can the economy sustain itself when technology keeps making more and more types of productive human activity obsolete?

What happens when AI gives each office worker the ability to be ten times more productive -- when we know that companies resist paying workers more for work that is aided by machines, as long as the labor market is full of possible replacement workers at the same wage point?

In the past, monarchy was considered the pinnacle of human progress. Now, we have corporate capitalism (plutarchy), that extracts profit from local economies and redistributes it to less than one percent of the world's population. Technology enables that process to accelerate faster than ever before -- robots don't demand more pay. An essential aspect of capitalism is to eliminate costs, and labor is a cost. Financial compensation for labor is also how humans survive (and spend, enabling other humans to survive).

At some point, the current corporate capitalist/consumerist model will begin to fail. Some say that it already is failing, and reactionary sociopolitical backlash has already begun.

So -- beyond the typical untrue dogma that an infinity of new industries will save us as new technologies are born -- what comes after the current system?

P.S. The "after oil" bit would have made this post twice as long, so that can wait for a separate discussion.

P.P.S. Yes, "universal basic income" (UBI) is a popular concept. There's only one problem: corporations actively evade taxation whenever possible, even to the point of lobbying and gerrymandering political processes to have leaders elected who protect their interests. If raising taxes to sustain a UBI fund is implausible, that is not a viable option until the idea of corporate responsibility becomes fashionable again for one reason or another.