I agree that what we're experiencing now is more or less the fallout of both the Industrial Revolution and how it interacts with the Information Age. Early education is still largely based on producing factory workers, while formal education is based on creating office drones. At no point in the course of this system is a human being really prepared for the arbitrary and restrictive nature of working for a modern corporate entity, nor are they adequately prepared to seek a government job and deal with the reams of red tape and bureaucracy.
I think technology has outpaced the average person's will to live. Everyone would much rather be at home playing videogames or on their phone constantly using Facebook or Twitter. This isn't the fault of that technology, its the end result of how delusional and short-sighted the people in power are. Shareholders, investors and company executives demand ever-increasing returns and ever-higher successes while at the same time refusing to listen to any criticism of the system they've sunk their money into.
Meanwhile the people on the ground reap none of these benefits. Those same people on the ground can then get on their phones and view the conditions in third world countries where life is even shittier and thus feel even more like the whole thing is pointless. Leaders act totally without responsibility and engage in actions that are morally dubious at best and outright villainous at worst. Some people snap completely and flee to ideas like Socialism or Neo-Communism because of their promises of a better world, but for the people who actually look into that kind of thing they find that promise just as empty.
I don't think there's a collapse coming, per se. I do however think society will shortly experience a huge schism that will sharply divide people along ideological lines. I think we'll see a lot more suicides and random acts of violent crime, at lot more chaos and a lot worse behavior on the part of our leaders as they struggle more and more with the reality of the situation. When our current model of economics becomes unsustainable due to mass automation, the leaders and fat cats will start to pick each other off one by one. When their numbers dwindled far enough, they're either going to have to implement reforms of some kind or they're going to double-down and withdraw from society completely.
Its a pretty zero-sum game. Nobody's going to win in the long run. I think we've reached the limits of human cognitive capacity and there appears to be no way of extending that capacity any further. Eventually people's minds just melt from the overload, which is why our leaders seem to be increasingly unhinged and why a lot of otherwise intelligent people are becoming depressed or killing themselves.
