Soon enough, according to Bill Gates, we'll all have personal robots. The precise implications of a transition to an economy largely run by hyperpowered, anthropomorphic machines is, obviously, unclear. It's pretty safe to assume you'll see a lot of occupational displacement, and at a point, you'll see more than can be effectively made up. Was Marx right, but we had to wait for robots? Maybe. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your usefulness!
Meanwhile, I do remember reading a science fiction story out of a decades-old collection of, I think, Pegasus award winners where the widow of a famed composer traveled to lobby a powerful, centenarian Senator to defeat a bill extending the time limit of artistic patents. The Senator didn't see why -- she, after all, stood to make millions. Indeed, he'd already promised to support the bill. She broke down sobbing.
In this mechanized world, she explained, where 50+% of humans classified themselves as "artists" because their services were no longer necessary elsewhere, you couldn't constrain the products of human creativity. There were a lot of possible artistic permutations, but they were not infinite, and to bounce up against the border of past works would prove an incalculable psychic damage to a society that had little else sustaining it. Her husband, indeed, had committed suicide after realizing a love song he wrote for her was actually a reformulated children's rhyme he subconsciously recalled from childhood. To radically extend patent periods would visit similar mental devastation on millions more. And it couldn't be done. We had already taken work away from people, we could not steal their art, too.
