Efficiency should vastly improve in 50 years. From my perspective the poor now live about as well as the middle class of 50 years ago, except they also enjoy better food, better medical care, the internet, more TV stations, cell phones, cherries in every season, etc etc that were not even available back then. With almost everything able to be be done more efficiently, more automated, more productively now and into the future it is hard to see how things will be more difficult. This sounds more like the population bomb, end of oil, famines etc predicted in the 1970s that should have happened long before now. Sure people will have to learn new things, and forget some old ones, but this is progress. Can't fathom why people keep predicting a bleaker future, when for centuries it has only gotten better.