The social and economic conditions are ripening as you read this. Like the States, the doors of economic opportunity are slowly closing and the gap between the affluent and the precariats is broadening. In a worldwide trend, many jobs are disappearing, starting with manufacture in the developed world.
Globalisation and technology are both responsible for the outsourcing of work and its extinction. While factory work was affected in the US, changing the industrial heartland to a rust belt, the future of the professional classes is likely be a hazard next.
Optical recognition software plus algorithms with artificial intelligence have rendered the job opportunities for many fledgling lawyers obsolete. Newly-minted lawyers often served their seniors by the exhausting process of reading thousands of pages of depositions, legal briefs and other research data, digesting, annotating and summarising. That work can now be done more efficiently and cheaply by computer.
There is already an impressive algorithmic application which can compete successfully with the work of oncology radiologists, screening for cancerous lesions with greater accuracy and, of course, more rapidly than human counterparts.
As the revolution in AI gains momentum, many previously highly skilled - and highly paid - professional roles will disappear.
In the US, serious - i.e non-Trumpian - policy-makers, looking at the erosion of manufacturing jobs focused people's hopes and attentions on tertiary education as a way out of potential joblessness, arguing for decades that higher education meant higher pay.
This column has taken issue with jobs and money as a goal of education. Now that goal may prove to be a blind alley, unless its focus becomes strictly vocational. The need for vocational skills - trade skills - will only increase as we experience more the effects of global warming.
I'm the last to put down general tertiary education - its best outcome is the ability to think through the issues of civic life on our small blue planet. No small thing. But there's no assured pot of gold ending that rainbow. Just soul food.
One other indicator of future social disruption is the presence of homelessness.
In rural New Zealand, this plight of the dispossessed is rarely found, perhaps because of the stronger bonds of small town life. This world-wide phenomenon is an accompaniment of city living.
Our present government has done little to counter or cope with this problem. In siphoning resources from the regions and their small towns and building a megalopolis out of Auckland, they've accelerated the trend toward homelessness as many of the less well off can no longer afford accommodation.
One vital part of our nation and culture still stands. It is that in time of crisis, indeed of significant need, New Zealanders in those small communities are still willing to help one another.
Outside of critical situations, in the day-to-day of maintaining the well-being a system exists of volunteerism that is a significant contributor to the healthy functioning of the community.
But all that is changing - and that's where September 23 comes in.
You think the Want to Know Nothings of the National Party, like Doctor Doolittle Jonathan Coleman, have anything to offer in the face of this social tsunami that's coming? They don't even want to look at the past, because it would mean accepting responsibility. What does that say about what they've got on offer for our future.
■Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
