One vision of the future economy: turning would-be factory workers into underpaid gamers.

Economic trends aren’t pretty: People with elite backgrounds are hoovering up an increasing share of new income and wealth. Automation is obviating more and more jobs. In the years to come, we’ll need new forms of employment.

Let’s crystal-ball this: Will there be a new way for the working class of the future to earn a paycheck? Sure: by playing video games.

That’s the bold prediction of Edward Castronova, an academic at Indiana University who studies the economics of online games. In a white paper, he argues that within 20 years, “playing games for money will come to be seen as a legitimate occupational choice for those whose skills are not valued by brick-and-mortar labor markets.”

Sounds nuts, right? But Castronova lays out the trend lines. First, consider how online games have evolved. Fifteen years ago, you typically paid about $15 a month to play. But in the past decade, game companies have devised the free-to-play model: It costs nothing to join the action, but if you want something cool – specialty armor, for instance – you have to buy it. This model has been wildly profitable. A top-rated free-to-play title, like Clash Royale, now brings in about $2.1 million a day from such purchases.

As with casinos, most revenue comes from “whales,” a tiny percentage of players who spend thousands annually. A study last spring by Swrv, a firm that helps companies market in-game items, discovered that just 0.2 percent of players are responsible for 48 percent of all revenue. A small population of high-spending players is subsidizing the masses.

Castronova predicts that economic trends will force those subsidies to grow. Automation will create huge masses of unemployed would-be factory workers. The super-rich will number fewer and fewer and get richer and richer. Which means game companies will drift toward a virtual-world New Deal. Keeping their “whales” happy will require making sure their worlds are vibrant communities. So the game companies need those low-spending, poorer folks to show up. Rich players don’t want to play with bots; they crave the social fellowship of real humans. And they also enjoy the thrill of lording their socioeconomic status over others.

That means the game companies will have to underwrite poor players. In the next 10 years, the companies might issue reward cards, spendable in the real world. Eventually, companies might find they need to pay to keep the proles alive and in the game.

Let’s be clear. This would not be, as Castronova himself acknowledges, utopia. “It’s not a good life,” Castronova says – not merely because of the likely-skimpy wages, but because of the isolation.

I have a sinking feeling that Castronova is onto something. Political leaders are doing little to prepare the U.S. for automation-propelled job loss.

In that absence, the market will chart its own path, one that makes schemes like this all too plausible.

CLIVE THOMPSON is a contributing writer at Wired and The New York Times Magazine.