The older I get, I tend to become a believer of the train of thought that says each generation believes they are different and they are living in the worst time in history for x, y, or z. The people that were losing buggy whip jobs had no idea what kinds of opportunities would be opening up in the future. We can't either. I know enough about automation to know it will create jobs in some ratio to those that are lost. Robots are programmed by people. They work on equipment people built and installed by people. Stuff wears out and things happen...automation can only accommodate so much before everything crashes. McDonalds may someday have replaced all of their front counter staff with kiosks but somewhere in that store there'll be people working. Most of us cannot envision what the future will be like. I don't believe robots, AI, automation will have us all sitting around the house, with nothing to do, waiting on our UBI debit cards to reset.
There is something truly different about today vs say, 100 years ago. I think this is a reason why there's so much division and social turmoil today. We don't know how to handle social media at the societal level, for example. Yes, there will be people working on the robots. But as technology increases, the competence necessary to work increases.
One hundred years ago, an able bodied man with an IQ of 80 could find work doing something. That was an era where physical strength was a competence much more in demand than today. But the kinds of work such a person could do today is way more limited because there aren't many jobs that just require an able bodied person. And as technology increasingly takes over those menial jobs, the jobs that replace those jobs requires higher intellectual competence.
This really is a problem we don't know how to solve.
Well. Maybe we know how to solve it. Maybe the answer is to make people more competent. Maybe technology can help the less competent people be competent enough. The demand would certainly be there to develop such products. And really, short of making people more competent, I don't know how we can solve this in a way that's compatible with human nature.