An inconvenient truth

No, this is not about global warming, although I will mention it later on down. It's about jobs and the economy.
What is not mentioned or I have not seen mentioned is how we are entering a period where all bets are off and none of the solutions from the past will fix what is obviously broken.
There are two problems, chickens coming home to roost so to speak, that started about 100 years ago and they are automation and population growth.
Both served us well until about 50 years ago but both are now threatening to sink the ship the middle class hoped to ride forever.
First, automation made it possible for us to make more things better and faster. Better and faster is now accelerating rapidly, thanks in large measure to computers and the Internet. Just about every job including blue collar and white collar requires fewer workers to produce more and more.
While fewer and fewer people are needed to make a product or provide a service, continued population growth means more and more people are finding themselves unemployed or underemployed. Business just doesn't need them. No one wants to say that.
The only solution as I see it is to at the very least put a stop to population growth. We don't need more hands on deck when the ship is fully automated.
I realize this solution which should be obvious will be met with great opposition from government, business and just about every religion.
Government wants more and more tax payers. Business wants more and more consumers and religions want more and more souls to save. But surely we are more than just tax payers, consumers and souls to be saved. Or are we?
So just for fun, let's return to Global Warming.
Even here if you want to be honest, the number one problem is more and more people consuming more and more of the Earth's natural resources, more and more people demanding more and more energy for both necessities and luxuries. More efficient this that and the other thing - yes - and more environmentally friendly ways to produce power, also yes. But the human population is growing faster than are the environmentally friendly ways to produce power. Even if that need were met, you still have the problem of the diminishing need for workers to produce the products. So your high unemployment problem will continue to get worse.
I believe we are on a collusion course with ourselves. We are becoming like lemmings and are our own worst enemy. We are playing the fiddle while we destroy the only Earth we have.