On a large scale, there's no meaningful difference between augmenting or replacing a job.

If an industry augments a function employing 100000 people so that every person can do twice as much, then that has the exact same effect as fully replacing a function that employed 50000 people; in both cases they need 50000 people less and they should do something else.

Augmentation increases productivity and as long as the organization has demand for their goods or services, they will keep the more productive employees to serve demand.

Demand is the key to the whole equation. No demand, no employees, automated or human.

The key word is could. It could also create a hyperstratified neo-feudal society a la "Diamond Age".

That's exactly the point - we need to be conscious of these possibilities, and steer towards the one that is preferable.

Great comment.

Actually, people did think that the internet would greatly increase niche markets pretty early. And that requires marketers to support.

And people did think people will own something like a smartphone, so it makes sense some people will be responsible for maintenance.

So maybe with all those new technologies coming(which some do new jobs), someone will need to build and support them, and who knows how many people that will take.

Augmenting is enough to massively disrupt industries. Look at law which used to be a safe middle class job and is now in a bimodal distribution of super high paid and low wage work. All that came from just having cheap OCR which let firms replace legions of well educated law grads searching through paper documents with "Ctrl+f" for the lawyers actually running the case.

Automation like this has led to new jobs everytime there's been a major change in the past and has been better for humanity. The problem is that this sometimes takes years or decades and the old workers are told to eat shit in the meantime while the capital owners collect all the newfound wealth.

Are you willing to live in abject poverty while your bosses get increasingly wealthy just because it'll be better for people in some distant future? That's a question that's usually answered with "No" and that societies don't want to even have asked if they wish to remain stable