There are two major vectors in today's social and economical life:
1) the population is steadily growing,
2) most of the businesses invest in automation in order to reduce their operational costs.

These vectors are opposite to each other. The result of these tendencies is that with the years we have more potential workers but less positions that could help employ all of them. That's why the unemployment rate peaks we notice today are not the highest ones.

In further perspective, new unemployed's (apparently the ones with lower mental skills, who are generally dismissed by the automation process), will be forced to migrate to less developed regions of the planet to apply their skills there, making the gap between the developed and third-world countries larger. Finally, the things will become irreversible, so third-world states will lose any chance to outrun the developed ones. None of the possible consequences of that world setup makes me happy.

A solution that might prevent this kind of future is to invent an extremely labour-consuming activity that will help to give a job to those millions of workers. This can be Moon or Mars expansion, or world-wide greenery planting program for example. Space investigation is a preferred one, as exploration of neighbour planets will also assist to overcome the overpopulation problem.