The most famous prediction along those lines surely is Keynes' essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren from 1930 [1], in which he entertained the not

The most famous prediction along those lines surely is Keynes' essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren from 1930 [1], in which he entertained the notion that "a hundred years hence" "the economic problem may be solved", "the standard of life in progressive countries [...] will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day", and would work "Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week", but mainly to stave off boredom. This inspired the book How Much Is Enough? by Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky and his brother [2]. Keynes' essay had some non-PC parts: he feared > a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations — who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing. It also had some utopian dreams: > The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. ) [1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Is_Enough%3F_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Is_Enough%3F_(book)