America, along with the world, will have to become something else eventually as automation will ultimately result in no one needing to work, which means distribution of resources will have to be mechanized by a system other than capitalism, a system in which resources are primarily distributed to the masses in exchange for the free market value of the work they perform.
We're already seeing the reduction of the need of workers to perform work in the world today in countries like Switzerland, which didn't have enough jobs to go around, resulting in a portion of the population working and complaining about having to pay taxes and support another growing portion of the population that couldn't find work, so it mandated a six-hour workday, prohibiting employers from working people longer than six hours a day. This created more jobs because an employer, for example, that runs 24 hours a day had to have four six-hour employees to cover that time period instead of three eight-hour employees.
What Switzerland's done, however, is a temporary fix, a Band-Aid. It will eventually reach the point, and not in the far-off future, that it, along with much of the world, will need to find another way to distribute resources to the masses other than basing it on the free market value of the work they perform, which is the backbone of capitalism. That's because the eventuality is one-hour work days to make sure there are opportunities for work in the economy in similar number to the labor pool, and then what? Zero-hour work days. How does that then work?
The United States is and has been facing what Switzerland has already dealt with. The long workdays and lax laws governing that, laws that have gradually been eroded all but completely away through loopholes and various other means since the United States instituted the eight-hour workday back in the 19th century, has created such an overabundance of labor supply that it has shifted the supply and demand curve for labor down so far that the price of labor in the free market has become so low that a large segment of the population is working well over eight hours a day and still not earning a living wage, a wage upon which one could subsist on one's own, but the United States has been extremely so and even quite resistant to doing anything about this, which is because of the Cold War.
Because of the Cold War, America developed a very staunch and rigid attitude towards capitalism, equating it to civil liberty, to freedom, it being antithetical to communism. While that's true, communism is both a form of government and a type of economy, the type of economy requiring that form of government to work. However, economy and government are in actuality two different things, and unlike a communist government to a communist economy, democracy, a free society, doesn't require a capitalist system. In fact, some would argue that a capitalist system can be antithetical to civil liberty when corporations become more powerful than society and impose their will and their interests on the citizenry, and those who do argue that would be right.
The long and the short of it is, like the horse and buggy of days gone by, capitalism is suddenly on its way out because of technological advancement. With technological advancement and the ever increasing automation of work, there is no way around it. So we can either continue clinging to a sinking ship or we can figure out a way off it and invent a new way, like we have invented so many things, to distribute resources to the people who need them, which is what "economy" is, what it does, its function, and whatever that system is, especially to Americans today, is going to look a lot like communism, not Leninist or Stalinist communism but Marxist communism.
But it won't actually be communism because communism is fundamentally about work, rewarding workers with the value of the work they perform rather than having extremely rich profiteers, a wealthy class, skim most of that value off the top and accumulating it unto themselves to make themselves even richer without actually doing any work that adds to production, adds to the gross national product, essentially being freeloaders because of coming to possess a bunch of resources they never actually worked for, which anyone must admit is a huge pitfall of capitalism, but regardless of that, as you can see, a distribution of resources, an economy, not based on work would not be communism as communism is all about work and distributing the rewards of work to the people who perform the work, an actually quite noble goal, even if in implementation is has repeatedly proven to fall flat on its face, not for its lack of nobility but for the lack of nobility of those putting it into action, for corruption.
Brass tacks: Communism is a work-based economy and the economy that the United States will need to graduate to if it is going to survive and thrive will be one not based on work, so while it may resemble communism because of how it will have to create systems to distribute resources to the masses, it will not actually be communism. Nor will it be capitalism. It will be something new, something likely born out of what is presently being called "democratic socialism," a movement primarily borne by Americans who see that capitalism is already breaking down but who do not recoil and shriek at the mere mention like the generations before them because of having been born after the Cold War and not having the biases deeply ingrained in them by more than 50 years of US Cold War propaganda.