Will robots bring about the end of work?

Automation looks set to replace many jobs in the next few decades. What work will be left for humans to do?

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has a simple way to predict the future. The future is simply what rich people have today. The rich have chauffeurs. In the future, we will have driverless cars that chauffeur us all around. The rich have private bankers. In the future, we will all have robo-bankers.

One thing that we imagine that the rich have today are lives of leisure. So will our future be one in which we too have lives of leisure, and the machines are taking the sweat? We will be able to spend our time on more important things than simply feeding and housing ourselves?