Time & Perspective Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin is doing a neat bit of rhetorical jujitsu: he takes a premise that should read like utopia (higher productivity, fewer humans doing drudge work) and frames it as a civilizational warning. The sentence’s quiet menace sits in its grammar. “Will be needed” sounds neutral, almost technical, but it smuggles in a brutal reclassification of people: not citizens, not workers with rights, just labor inputs whose necessity is declining. In that passive construction, you can hear the corporate boardroom and the policy memo at once.

The intent is less to predict a gadget-driven future than to puncture the complacent story that capitalism automatically converts technological gains into broadly shared prosperity. Rifkin is pointing at the mismatch between an economy organized around wages and a production system increasingly indifferent to human labor. The subtext: if work is how most people earn dignity, security, and political voice, what happens when the labor market stops being the primary distribution mechanism? “Goods and services for the global population” widens the frame beyond rich-country automation panics; it hints at supply chains, offshoring, and the way “efficiency” can be extracted from anywhere on Earth.

Context matters because Rifkin’s career tracks recurring waves of automation anxiety - from industrial robotics to digitization to AI. His line lands as a pressure test for institutions: education systems that promise employability, welfare states built around employment, and political parties that treat job creation as the only social policy that counts. The provocation isn’t that machines will make things; it’s that societies will have to decide what humans are for when the economy needs less of them.