I'm tempted to delete this comment because of the quick downvotes, but I'm not going to. I think it's a valid thing to think about at the very least.

Then I head directly for the automated checkout line and tell my wife that the main reason I use those is because I like the idea of computers putting unskilled labor out of work, because I'm a bastard like that.

All the more reason we need to support education from an early age and more importantly get back to supporting journeyman and trade education -- so we have less unskilled labor.

If for every 4 cashiers replaced by self-checkout, the self-checkout companies only create 1 job, what's the end game? Will we figure it out before millions get aged out of the workforce in their 40s and 50s, too soon to have accumulated a means to retire?

There isn't necessarily value to "having a job" (especially when you talk about all the unskilled jobs that are going away, which are often jobs that people are doing purely as a means to support their life); there's value to being able to live and have the life that you want. If getting everyone they life they want takes less and less work, cool.

But really, people will likely just keep wanting more and better and we won't run out of work to do

Who is going to pay people the same to work less? Indeed, as we need less and less labor, there will be downward pressure on wages, which will make the situation (for the average worker) worse, not better. The economic actors who benefit most from technological progress are those who own the most capital, and their earnings from that capital are taxed at such low amounts that it won't provide money for the government to sustainably pay people to work less either.

Despite the huge advancements in productivity and technological advancement, we still have a lot of pressure to end or cut back on things like unemployment insurance. Despite the number of unemployed people, we still have pressure to increase the retirement age. Even as we are rapidly approaching the point where many industries could still be profitable with 30 hour work weeks, we push more and more jobs into exempt status, making it far, far more likely that you'll work a 50 or 60 hour work week long before you work a 30 hour week.

I'm not advocating purposely slowing technological progress, but we do need to be aware of the ramifications of it and figure out ways to deal with economic conditions where we require significantly less labor than is available. Our current economic and social constructs aren't really setup to deal with this sort of situation.

That, I doubt. The work that remains requires highly-skilled labour. I think there is a fraction of the potential workforce that will never reach a level at which it can work the remaining jobs. I also think that fraction grows as automation increases (human dishwashers? Gone. Bank tellers? Gone. Bus drivers? Not gone yet, but that could change in ten years). Net effect: there is less work, but we cannot distribute the work that remains over the same fraction of the population.

The trouble, of course, is that we've already been on the automation train long enough that it's not quite so simple as just removing the law now. Is not like flood of low-paying (but greater than zero-paying) jobs will materialize out of thin air.

Capital costs will rise when we run out of cheap energy, but I doubt that will be sufficient.

IMO, the ethical way to get there is through a basic income guarantee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee).

With it, minimum wages could be abolished. Then that flood of low-paying jobs will materialize, not out of thin air, but out of China. It will, likely, also bring back jobs in shoe repair and the like.

This is probably not a choice i'd make if I didn't live in a city and commute by bus and bike.

Let me re-cast your comment, circa 1900 (or 1800):

"There's another one million agricultural jobs lost to technology in a country that has no answer to the growing imbalance between the working-age population and gainful employment opportunities. 'Gainful' employment doesn't mean that you yoke yourself to someone else's factory somewhere; it means you own your own plot of land and work it."

I'm tempted to delete this comment because of the quick downvotes, but I'm not going to.

The reason you'll get downvoted is because your comment fails to account for productivity and other gains from trade or specialization; taken to the logical extreme, ensuring that no jobs are "lost to technology" means that we all live as hunter-gatherers, since any level of further technological development will put someone "out-of-work," even if that work is of no value.

This is going to sound harsh, but if you don't want to be downvoted, learning some economics first (and I'm talking about micro-econ—the stuff that works).

I'm watching my parents, aunts and uncles struggling to even get interviews after months of unemployment following decades of gainful employment at companies that downsized during the recession. These are mostly white collar workers that never had trouble finding a job with a few days or weeks of searching all their lives; suddenly they don't even hear back after applying to dozens of companies.

It's the productivity gains technology continues to create that allowed hundreds of thousands of businesses to lay off workers during this latest recession while maintaining and growing their profits. Society progresses, yet a significant portion of it suffers during these changes nonetheless.

Your comment admonishing me for being somewhat troubled by this shows a lack of empathy.

As I see it, when you are presented with a change that adds efficiency to an area of the economy (and thus reduces the amount of labor required to get to the same level of output), you've got a choice to make. Either you can attempt to maintain the inefficiency (in this case, redundant car salesmen) in order to keep those workers in a job or you can attack the root of the problem and put those workers to work doing something that adds value to the economy.

I'm not saying that there aren't moral and ethical arguments in trying to keep a job for those workers, because there, especially from a societal standpoint. But from an economic standpoint, maintaining those inefficiencies typically leads to systemized exploitation of artificial inefficiencies (case in point: smuggling to bypass protectionist tariffs) and that wastes additional effort that could be adding value to the economy.