A possible interesting outcome: Automation reduced the amount of people who need to work, those who don't need to work will mine bitcoin, and mine bitcoin is not a very difficult work, just need some basic computer knowledge, so mining will absorb all the jobless people. Now everyone will have a job
If too many people join the mining, then there will be less and less people working with production of other goods/services, this will increase the price of those goods/services and reduce the bitcoin relative exchange value, reach a balance
Did you check out the first link with the talk by Marshall Brain? that is really good for describing whats going to happen, did you see the graph with the market job rates? it looked pretty grim, I figure if someone could find the graph he was showing we could extrapolate a trend line.
but yeah, the difficulty would scale to those people too eventually, but I think while it is being adopted the price should increase to increase the system capability of handling all transactions globally, so the system has a built in incentive to add as many miners as possible until it scales to unprofitability... of course counting on the fact that there are enough transaction to pay for all those miners cause the Bitcoin lottery is not going to cut it if there's too many miners.
The production of goods could be further automated, Have you seen the FPGA chips? They are Programmable Field Gate Arrays, these chips could be programmed to virtualize any instituions work load, Bitcoin could be a model for sustainable automation. I mean we have to have a measure of scarcity in the system, it has to be, otherwise jeez someones going to start using their new 3d printers to print a bazzilion trinkets just like a hoarder. they'd probably just do it to spite everyone else too.
jeez it could get crazy because I know you can build neural chips for neural networks with a FPGA... this could be interesting, those chips cost millions of dollars for each one, one of those FPGA could make a Semantic Web Machine for 1/10000 of the price.
jeez all I can think of are all the industries that could be Virtualized and distributed just like Bitcoin thanks to these FPGA chips.
Hmmm. the loss of the work force would occur slowly, cause I don't think all those unemployed people have the money to buy a GPU. cause I know people are greedy they would still try to work while their rigs were happily virtualizing all human institution for a fee or they could be incentivised to start another open source corporation like bitcoin to generate more revenue...
but wow, I mean wow Satoshi designed and created the first client and then got input from thousands of people, this is a viable method of building a company...
lets see what industries could be automated: everything pretty much, just thinking of something to virtualize.
Accounting companies done online, instead of inhouse they could send their work loads to the network to start managing their AR/AP work.
maybe distributed research farms for the pharmaceutical companies, I mean if they got paid in bitcoins they can take some of the miners away to do some useful tasks like finding new cures for cancer. etc. the network would have more processing power than anything the pharmaceutical industry could come up with cost effectively.
massive p2p simulators for governments and other virtualized companies. my head is full of ideas.