Our economy is still marked by massive disruption: technological innovation isn't just limited to services. Process engineering, chemical engineering, astronomy, physics, linguistics, archeology, ... they're all experiencing disruption at an increasing pace. They all increase GDP.
To me, this is an indication that as we provide people with powerful tools, their minds expand to use those tools. The exponential feedback may become much more smooth (less "disruptive") but I think we're a long way from a local maximum.
The current economy still "feels" like an idling 2-stroke leaf blower to me. It sputters and races because its carburetor and ignition are, well, inefficient.
What would it take to get a jet engine-like economy?
However, you're not answering your comment's grandparent: how to avoid, cope with, or assume away the concern that a super-high-tech economy will leave unemployed people who aren't intellectually sophisticated enough to participate.
Threats to survival do tend to motivate "almost everybody" to attempt new skills, or attempt to change things in their favor. I deliberately avoided saying what the changes ought to be. And I don't think there are real, present threats to survival for most of us. I don't think it's a good idea to rain down mandates on "everybody else," when society is already discovering better means by working organically. I like to think of that as innovation.
My main intent in posting was to point out that there are solutions being found -- not by the "invisible hand" of economics, but by the collaborative efforts of the non-intellectual non-sophisticated "unwilling participants." Though I think education eventually has the highest payoff, I enjoy working at a community level with the innovation happening all around me.
Is changing your intellectual sophistication hard? I mean, I learn programming by basically bashing my fingers against the keyboard. The concepts aren't difficult to learn, but it require tons of practice to become competent.
One additional wrinkle will be the tendency of the poor to have more children than the rich, exacerbating the jobs-to-people ratio problem.
