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I think it is a bit early to say that overpopulation has hit and efficiencies in the workplace have made the majority of the populace unnecessary.
A lot of the employment situation right now is currency obsession and the zero-sum philosophy taken to the utmost extremes. You have a wealth class that spends more and more of its energy on creating sucker bets that drain massive amounts of capital from productivity and puts it into finance.
Eliminate 'who is going to pay for it' for a second. If we are truly going to enter a age with super high productivity per worker then we should see: higher salaries, reduced workweek durations, no supply shortages, and less waste. All of which we are not seeing with people currently overstressed, underpaid, news articles of supply disruptions slowing entire industries, and massive resource burn and pollution from industry chasing a flimsy dollar.
I think if we were to truly take a technology and efficiency approach we'd have a much better standard of living and employment for quite some time, and then followed by a period where we truly have exhausted the amount of work needed in this country (and others) compared to the amount of people we have to do it.
If we decide to measure our economy by how many cheap plastic toys we can produce, then yes the market has been saturated. If we go with a whole economic picture of standard of living, I think there is a lot of room for growth. Ultimately, I think technology could take us to the point where there truly is not enough work, but its far from that point still. Maybe tech has just pushed past the economics of yesterday where cheap plastic toy production was everything.
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