Impending Disaster?

I saw an article in the paper today that jogged my memory about several other articles I read. There's a significant shift from defined benefit pension plans towards defined contribution plans. However as a population, the majority of us are rather ignorant about financial planning, investments, and retirement needs. There was a series of articles earlier about people's retirement expectations and much of it is a blur right now, but I recall one of them being about how many people felt that $10,000 was enough to retire on. I wonder how many of them were asked to take another guess. Anyway, as the current generation retires, which as I understand it is the last generation for most people to have a defined benefit pension, I can't help but feel some kind of impending doom as the first generation of mostly defined contribution pension plan retirees try to figure things out. This is still a good number of years away, but I wonder if there'll be any wide spread distress over this in the coming years.