This is one year old

LONDON — A decade after the world descended into a devastating economic crisis, a key marker of revival has finally been achieved. Every major economy on earth is expanding at once, a synchronous wave of growth that is creating jobs, lifting fortunes and tempering fears of popular discontent.

No tidy, all-encompassing narrative explains how the world has finally escaped the global downturn. The United States has been propelled by government spending unleashed during the previous administration, plus a recent $1.5 trillion shot of tax cuts. Europe has finally felt the effects of cheap money pumped out by its central bank.

In general terms, improvement owes less to some newfound wellspring of wealth than the simple fact that many of the destructive forces that felled growth have finally exhausted their potency.

The long convalescence has yielded a global recovery that is far from blistering in pace, and geopolitical risks threaten its demise. Many economists are skeptical that the benefits of growth will reach beyond the educated, affluent, politically connected class that has captured most of the spoils in many countries and left behind working people whose wages have stagnated even as jobless rates have plunged.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/business/its-not-a-roar-but-the-global-economy-is-finally-making-noise.html?

And Trump's moves to limit immigration will make it even worse.

said Barret Kupelian, senior economist in the London office of PwC, the global accounting and consulting company. “If something bad happens in one economy, the fact that global growth is spread gives you more assurance that this is more sustainable.” . .

The result is a hopeful albeit fragile recovery, one vulnerable to the increasingly unpredictable predilections of world leaders.

Threats of nuclear annihilation exchanged by President Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have sown fears. Britain’s pending departure from the European Union — known as Brexit — holds the potential to ensue absent a deal, subjecting Europe to grave uncertainty about the rules of trade especially for finance. And Mr. Trump’s on again-off again vows to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement while unleashing a trade war with China also risks derailing growth.

“We used to operate under the idea that Western markets are politically stable, while we accepted that frontier markets were risky,” said Martin Scheepbouwer, chief executive officer of the OLX Group, which operates online classified advertising platforms in 41 countries. “Nowadays, with Brexit in Europe and the presidency in the United States, there’s a new level of instability looming over the economy. That’s something that concerns us.”

And the corporate tax cuts will insure that corporations have money to adopt the new technologies.

Humans are to be replaced by machines to the extent possible.

But I think our society has to reform its socio-economic systems, so that as machines increasingly take over mundane and boring tasks, that people are rewarded with the spoils... some nations, like Switzerland, have already taken steps in that direction, guaranteeing every citizen a certain base income. That, in combination with improved education (somebody has to program and control the machines) , training, etc., is needed.

But then all of this is not necessarily new in concept. After all, the Luddites were smashing looms a few hundred years ago because they felt, rather that adapt to the new technology, that it would deprive them of their livings. Which it can if industry and government don't team up properly to mitigate the impacts and turn a potential riot situation into a win-win for all.

Currently there are some measures in place to help the "economically dislocated", but these tend to be too general and short term (six months of unemployment benefits is often not enough to retrain someone), as well as often being clumsily implemented. Perhaps the onus should be put on industry to factor in the costs of retraining their workers for new automation assisted production, rather than just casting them adrift?