The article does note this, albeit using "good job" as a proxy for "all the things one might have historically expected to stem from having a good job."
This seems like a forewave of the trends that point towards the basic income argument. Fewer productive jobs being necessary than labor force to fill them results in bifurcation of the labor market: between overpaid specialties (e.g. software dev) and underpaid make-work (e.g. McDonald's and Walmart) there's been a hollowing out "historically normal" jobs that don't take specialized knowledge but are still productive enough to afford a good quality of life.
In the face of this, opting out and escaping into a virtual world seems fairly reasonable. Especially if you're on the losing end of whatever the current hot specializations are.
I think this sector is now a embodied in sales/marketing. It's reasonable to expect from some one to become a productive salesperson after a few months. This professional will have many options from online marketing through mall cart sales to selling cloud services to corporations
What a nightmare vision that gives me; Automation and lucky people who randomly chose the right skillset work, producing more and more of the core economy, and the rest of the meatbags are left selling stuff to each other?
What happens when many business services are selected from automated markets... I guess we all sell custom hand-made widgets to each other?
Anything that can be eaten by software will be eaten by sufficiently advance software eventually.
I can't think of any substantial value-adds from sales/marketing in the future to necessitate adding jobs there. High value (e.g. Apple) is currating a brand and most value is added at the top (average Genius salary looks around $45k [1]). Low value (e.g. Android OEMs) doesn't have the profit margins to support a larger human-sales/marketing team. And commodity (e.g. McDonald's) is high-level strategic branding with essentially no low level value add.
This seems like a forewave of the trends that point towards the basic income argument. Fewer productive jobs being necessary than labor force to fill them results in bifurcation of the labor market: between overpaid specialties (e.g. software dev) and underpaid make-work (e.g. McDonald's and Walmart) there's been a hollowing out "historically normal" jobs that don't take specialized knowledge but are still productive enough to afford a good quality of life.
In the face of this, opting out and escaping into a virtual world seems fairly reasonable. Especially if you're on the losing end of whatever the current hot specializations are.