Extrapolating medium term trends
Yes, we still have a surprising amount of work. One reason for this is of course that we can burn through more and more resources. However resources are typically finite. There's only so much oil you can turn into cheap plastic toys.
For areas where the limiting factor is the workforce, we have found other ways to keep more people employed. In engineering we purposefully stop giving students good education so they will get worse and worse. This results in engineers needing exponentially more time to solve problems. Essentially since they have never learned how to actually solve problems, or how other people have solved problems in the past, their solutions often involve creating more problems than they were trying to solve. This causes a chain reaction which can even become critical.
In other areas like management, we are seeing the creation of "bullshit jobs". Jobs which serve no purpose but to create things for people to do. There are companies producing household appliances which have whole departments thinking about how to create an overarching theme of management so they can justify, more or less logically, why they have production plants.
We are currently still doing rather well at wasting work, however I believe it is very naive to think that this can go on for ever.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
