[hershel]

"The continuing trend towards fewer people being employed in manufacturing, and greater automation of service jobs, will continue: our current societal model, whereby we work to earn money with which to buy the goods and services we need may not be sustainable in the face of a continuing squeeze on employment. But since when has consistency or coherency or even humanity been a prerequisite of any human civilization in history? We'll muddle on, even when an objective observer might look at us and shake her head in despair."

He wrote very little about that subject, although there's decent likelihood that will be the issue(together with AI,VR and possibly medical innovation) that will make 2034 very different from out time.

[araes]

I'd guess because Stross tends to be a very pragmatic / utilitarian sci-fi writer.

We suspect its going to be a thing, but nobody really knows what the death of human employment will mean, or if it will really happen. If it does, its probably much more of a black swan than "the internet of things", but as he noted with cars, sometimes things you discount end up revolutionizing the world, and stuff you thought was a killer, because of short range performance, ends up bland in the long run. Its kind of like stocks, everybody wants to buy FB or Google after they change the world, but its a whole nother story to figure that out beforehand.

You can guess that the death of employment for pay will be a huge event, but to say much more you have to start committing toward one of many possible paths beyond your event horizon. Maybe a revolution as robots steal our jobs, maybe boring and mostly like today, maybe endless freedom to create, or kind of pointless (cause we're all VR slaves or some other such thing)). The slope's there, but we can't see over the hill.

Aside: I dig that the later half reads like a love letter for one of my favourite, and one of the more durable languages out there. Almost 30 years and Perl's still quietly chuggin along.