What would happen if all jobs were automated?

Full automation separates two things that wage labour currently bundles: producing goods and distributing claims on them. Historically, automation has displaced specific occupations while total employment kept rising, because new categories of work appeared — agriculture fell from most of the workforce to a few per cent in developed economies without producing permanent mass unemployment. Whether that pattern holds when the displaced capability is general rather than specific is genuinely unknown, and is where reasonable economists disagree most sharply. If it does not hold, output could rise while income concentrated in whoever owns the capital, which is a distribution question rather than a scarcity one, and the proposed answers — universal basic income, sovereign wealth funds, shorter hours — are all untested at scale. There is also a large body of evidence that work supplies structure, status and social contact independent of income, and that involuntary unemployment damages health accordingly.

How confident this is

This is speculation. The scenario is far enough outside anything observed that the answer depends heavily on which assumptions you start from — treat it as a thought experiment, not a prediction.

Society

• What would happen if everyone stopped having children? Schools would empty within a decade, the workforce would begin shrinking in about twenty years, and the last human would die in roughly a century.
• What would happen if everyone stopped eating meat? A large drop in agricultural emissions and land use, offset by disruption to a billion livelihoods and some regions with no alternative.
• What would happen if antibiotics stopped working? Routine surgery, chemotherapy and childbirth would all become far more dangerous — this is already happening slowly.
• What would happen if half the world's population disappeared? Not abundance — the collapse of specialised supply chains, because modern systems need specific people rather than a certain number of them.
• What would happen if the world's population doubled overnight? Food is the binding constraint — global production feeds around 8 billion, and doubling demand cannot be met from existing stocks.
• What would happen if everyone lived to 150? It depends entirely on whether those are healthy years — extended lifespan without extended healthspan makes almost everything worse.
• What would happen if everyone worked a four-day week? Trials generally show output holding steady with better wellbeing — but the results come from office work, not from hospitals or factories.
• What would happen if everyone drove an electric car? Urban air quality would improve immediately; the grid would need roughly a quarter more electricity, and mining demand would rise sharply.
• What would happen if everyone spoke the same language? Trade and science would get modestly easier, and roughly seven thousand languages worth of knowledge would be lost.
• What would happen if nobody paid taxes? Everything funded collectively stops — roads, courts, defence, schools, health systems and pensions — within weeks to months.
• What would happen if all borders opened? Economic models suggest a very large rise in global output, and nobody can model the political response, which is the part that would decide it.