I did a blog post on this sort of thing:
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/those-who-wor...Sadly, I think that there are too many people in power who want the current arrangement to persist. Allowing people to work more creatively is great for society, but it's bad for the people who currently hold power (who care more about their relative position in society than the health of society as a whole). I don't see a non-confrontational solution.
I'm half socialist. I actually think the best way out is to provide a substantial basic income. Emphasis on basic, not minimum, income. The difference is that MI means the government makes up the difference for low earners, whereas BI is an amount (of cash and services, such as healthcare and education) that everyone-- rich, poor, or middle-class-- gets. Then there's no "welfare valley" where a person becomes poorer by getting a job; one's income is a monotonically increasing function, as it should be, of what one earns. I think the BI should be about 50% of society's income, financed through flat taxation, a small wealth tax at the upper end, and very high (90+ at top) inheritance taxes. The other 50% is distributed by a free market. This actually makes most middle-class peoples' net tax (remember that they get the BI as well) lower. I would also, if you haven't guessed this, cut the military budget dramatically.
Once BI is in place, you don't need the patchwork of semi-authoritarian and conditional welfare programs that require bureaucracies to prevent abuse and fraud or determine who should get it and who not: everyone gets it. The rest of the wealth is allowed to flow on an essentially free market (so you have a capitalistic engine on top of the socialist infrastructure). It's freer than the one we have. For example, once everyone has basic income, you don't need a minimum wage (which is just a clumsy minimum-income program paid-for by low-end employers, who compensate by hiring less, creating unemployment).
No one has to work, so the least productive people probably use the option not to work, but the most productive people do a lot more: they're more creative, autonomous, and effective. Basic income wouldn't stop most people from working, but it would dramatically change how they work-- for the better. The net gain is positive. The worst thing about basic income is that it might create an underclass of entitled parasites at the bottom of society, but authoritarian corporate capitalism has a class of entitled parasites at the top of it, and that's a lot more unhealthy for society.
One partial fix might be to "fix" job searching, but internet career sites are nothing new and, while they might match talented people more efficiently with jobs, don't fix the underlying problems of corporate capitalism. Startups are great, for people privileged enough to do them and connected enough to have a shot, but in the "real world", bad people are on top and hold the cards.