Robots

Many people in the 19th and early 20th century expected that machines would release humans of the hard work and improve our quality of life so we could live working less and enjoying life more. Sci-Fi stories portrayed future societies were machines did the work and humans as a whole enjoyed that reduction of hard work and dedicated themselves to philosophical and cultural activities.

The reality is that those who have a job have to work as hard if not harder than before in order to lead a 'normal life' (perhaps not physically as hard but surely in terms of time and effort) and because of machines a lot of people have become unemployed and my guess is that the trend will grow worse in the coming future. The huge level of automatisation in current industry has drastically reduced the need for human employees and companies strive to automatise their processes more and more and reduce their human workforce as much as possible.

The problem is that all that work now performed by machines does not produce any benefit for those whose work has been taken over but all the contrary, it has made them miserable. Alright automatisation allows products to be cheaper for the consumer but we have to pay attention or we will get a society where things are cheap but only a few people have any money to buy them.