There is a trope in science fiction that technological developments, having grown exponentially, will soon be growing too fast for almost any humans to contribute. Beyond this point there won't be any meaningful economic value you can assign to human life, because a very smart person and a programmable factory and an army of robots, nanomachines and what have you will easily outcompete human labour. I believe Facebook employs about 1000 people, Twitter a few hundred. How many people work on Intel's design staff? Add in AMD and NVidia - and you still won't have 100,000. People are constantly being laid off from automotive manufacturing, but there are more cars every year.
This nerdy future is sometimes called the Singularity - the point at which technological development relative to human life span and learning capacity is effectively vertical, an infinite rate of growth. This is the rapture for Nerds, when all-powerful computers and the few humans intelligent enough to remain useful shake off all the bonds of scarcity of time and space.
And those of us who are not that useful will be stuck as Rump Humanity, the non-contributing 99%. I know one, maybe two people who might escape being Rump Humanity, but the rest of us, alas will soon have little to offer the productive ones but what Homer Simpson has to offer Marge - 'complete and utter dependence.'
<frown> Mmmmm.... That's not a good thing, Homer. <frown/>
</frown> — but I gather my XML well-formedness skills will be up against the wall sooner than most ~:)
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