*People in what you quoted was intended to mean "anybody who would have been a farmer", so that's the 68% that have to find alternative employment.
I live in an apartment building, my rooms have air conditioning units, and I have a bed and a sofa and a refrigerator and lots of other things that improve my quality of life, and people had to build all of those things (including the building I live in and the rooms in the building and the power plant that runs all the stuff in my apartment and the buses and trains I use to get to places and the roads and track those drive on etc.), the labor and ingenuity required for all those things to exist comes from (I think) that 68%+ of people who were unemployed by technology, and those people also have their own things (homes and food and furniture and transportation), which they use to entertain themselves or make themselves more comfortable.
Seeking leisure is a human nature, true. But maybe also human nature is to compete for resources, get more for your family, and make yourself more attractive to the other sex, even if that means working harder. If the alternative is unemployment, this may drive people to work in (or even create) services that they know are not really that useful.
Are you sure? Maybe what they are actually pursuing is trying to convince other people that some new job is sorely needed in the "new economy"?