Isn't that kind of the point of technological progress?

Job automation is great, but there are externalities that should be accounted for ahead of time. You can ask, "who pays for this?" Well, the obvious answer is the companies that will be enriching themselves due to society's sacrifice. Although, that has happened during the pandemic, so it's clear corporations aren't going to do so out of some sense of civic duty.

I think hampering technological progress to protect jobs is the wrong approach though. We need to contend with the fact that traditional supply-side economics will start to break down as we enter an era where most or all human needs can be met with automation.

1) We'll all need to collectively let go of our societal ideal that work is virtuous. We will need to accept that a significant portion of people have little to no productive work available to them, and that there is nothing wrong with that. It's just the natural culmination of increasing automation and societal advancement. UBI would be a necessity in this scenario.

2) We'll see an increasing number of "make work jobs" that exist solely to keep people busy, and to generate an illusion of productivity. These jobs may ultimately be government funded, although governments may obscure the source of the funding to keep the "productivity illusion" going. For example, governments may provide business grants to keep a certain number of low-wage workers employed. I suppose this essentially would be an indirect UBI program, except that we'd make people do some nominal amount of unproductive work to "prove" that they're worthy of the UBI.

I strongly suspect we'll head towards option 2.

I honestly can summarize it this way. Savers keep saving even when there is nothing left to save because there is no downside to having too much money but lots of upside to having more even if each single dollar is incrementally less useful. To maintain full employment all savings must be invested. The reason for that is quite simple. When you spend 50% of your income you are working more than you really need to. The extra hours that you are putting in mean someone else does not need to put in those work hours (50% less employment for them). So, you use the money which was previously sitting idle on a bank account by lending it out. Of course, the modern system has no direct connection between savings and actual money being lent out, rather it is the money hole (the money you have saved is not circulating) in the economy which causes unemployment that is driving further borrowing to restore full employment.

One could say that if you are working twice as much as you need, every second hour you are working is actually charity, it's not productive in the sense that you need it to maintain your lifestyle and it is not productive in the sense that anyone else has a need for it. There is no way you are getting a return off that charity when the economy is already saturated and everyone has everything they need. Yet money does not represent this act of charity, instead we pretend that you are still owed the same amount of products and services for all eternity, meaning what you are doing is not for the benefit of society, it's for your own benefit at the expense of someone else.

Probably the worst thing you can do is do what the Germany did before WW2. Do massive austerity programs during a depression hoping it makes things better. Homeless and starving people don't care that all the jobs are done by two thirds of the population if that means they don't get to eat. As I have said, if you are working more than you need to work for yourself, then you ought to work for the sake of someone else, anything else is selfish. If two thirds of the population is doing all the work and only doing it for itself then the rest is going to get angry very quickly.

> The extra hours that you are putting in mean someone else does not need to put in those work hours (50% less employment for them)

that's only true if you set the amount of necessary goods/services to a constant. I dont think that's true in the real economy - people have unlimited desires and demands, constrained only by the amount of money they have. The economy cannot be saturated, at least not until the world reaches star-trek level of tech where there's zero effort duplicators and materializers, and where no human labour is ever needed for anything.

Therefore, a person choosing a particular life-style that is less costly than they make in income is doing so because they expect to stop working in the future (and thus consume what they "save up" now, plus any improvements via productivity increases since). This savings takes a long and complicated path to turn into investment, but ultimately it would increase productivity, which is where the returns on investment comes from.

> if you are working more than you need to work for yourself, then you ought to work for the sake of someone else, anything else is selfish

well, the case study of communism ideal - that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi... , vs what actually happened, tells me that this idealistic viewpoint doesn't work in reality. People will work more if it benefits themselves, and only if it benefit themselves.

If you shatter the "lie" that excess work is not for yourself, but for "charity", you also stop people from working more than bare sustenance, and it would stop the savings->investment->higher productivity cycle. Society would be poorer for it despite the equality that would result (everyone is equally poor).

> Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer, doctor, or lawyer.

Society used to say the same thing about reading and writing (not everyone is cut out to do that), and society was (mostly) wrong. Pushing people higher and higher up the value chain has been happening forever. Eventually we will hit singularity, but even the software engineers, doctors, and lawyers will be obsolete then.

That doesn't follow, it just means that the demand structure changes. One thing that happens is the comparative advantage for being human increases, but you are human so that makes it easier. eg YouTube is a new kind of automation that produced a job called YouTuber.

Technology has a robust history of displacing jobs, and humans have a robust history of learning new skills. Change is never comfortable, but predictable.

That case isn't true. The new generations had jobs well enough (increased productivity grew the economy much faster than before), they weren't committed to weaving clothes by hand. The Luddites themselves didn't fair as well in the short term, but many of them would have aged out of the work force in a few years anyways (manual weaving is pretty unforgiving on the body).

Truck drivers are rapidly aging as well, if self driving vehicles move retirement up by 5 or so years, it isn't going that huge of a deal (we can rely even on America's social safety net), and their kids didn't want to be truck drivers anyways.

That's quite optimistic. When did politicians ever talk about moving up the retirement age in the last decades.

The internet brought insane growth through productivity gains in all industries. Even more than I'd expect from self-driving cars. And we haven't talked about moving up the retirement age.

Also the question is what these people do now? In the next twenty years of unemployment until they reach the current retirement age?