There's a lot of blind faith in "New jobs will appear as old ones are obsoleted".

That's certainly has been true, but I don't think it's absolutely always going to be true.

Further, what we've seen is that primarily low skill high wage jobs have been replaced with high skill jobs. This is evidenced by the fact that you simply can't make a good living off a high school degree.

Based off this

https://www.careerprofiles.info/careers-largest-employment.h...

How many of those jobs are in danger of being automated?

    Cashiers,
    food preparation,
    freight,
    Customer service representatives (I know, you're thinking no way, but a lot of effort is going into AI chatbots to cut down on CS requirements).

accounting (In fact, this is what I'm working on), order fillers, Truck drivers

What happens to the millions when those jobs are slowly eroded away? It's easy to cheat and say "Something else will probably come up" but I simply don't think that will continue to happen in the next 10->20 years.

There's only so much productivity we can utilize. What happens when we've saturated? Unemployment.

I don't think any nation is really well equipped at this point to handle large portions of their workforce being automated away.

Sure, the standard of living will go up for everyone with jobs. However, that will be less and less of the population as time goes on.

This is why programs like UBI and universal healthcare are important. Without them, things are going to be pretty bleak for a lot of people (even with them, and a constant population growth, things won't look good).

> There's only so much productivity we can utilize. What happens when we've saturated? Unemployment.

There's only so much productivity we can utilize _at a given price point_. It's possible wages could fall instead, although there's definitely a floor to that.

That's one of the interesting implications of UBI; it would theoretically make it easier to find free or close to free labor. I still don't think it would be plentiful, but I would guess there will be an uptick in the number of people like amateur astronomers who will sit and watch the sky at night for free.

Why not simply reducing working hours for everyone? The risk of UBI is that rent-seekers might just engulf this guaranteed income by raising their prices, and then we will rapidly be back to square one.

Working 40 hours a week is not a natural law, peasants in the Middle Age worked less hours annually than us today. Reducing work hours would also have a positive environmental effect.

Otherwise, I wholly agree with your diagnosis of the situation.

> Why not simply reducing working hours for everyone?

Because either that reduces total wages for everyone, or it makes more people permanently unemployable by raising the cost floor per unit of labor value.

Also, you can't reduce working hours for everyone, only the currently employed, and in practice reliably only the near-full-time-employed-on-hourly-wages.

> The risk of UBI is that rent-seekers might just engulf this guaranteed income by raising their prices

Not really, since UBI funded by progressive tax increases compresses post-policy incomes rather than raising them uniformly. You'd need ironclad market segmentation that survives income distribution compression to “capture” any groups increase in post-policy income, and if you have that, you can just take all of that groups income anyway, which is a problem that needs addressed independently of whether UBI is adopted.

Some services are necessary but may not bring enough revenue to justify paying the worker a minimum wage. Robots can do these jobs and people can then focus on jobs that actually value their time.