On what timeline do you believe this circular AI/robot reality will come to pass? 10 years? 100? Either way this is a fallacious argument.

A truly ridiculous amount of current work could be automated with today's tech and massive capital investment. And by today's tech, I don't even include current advances in ML. Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment. Retail stores, likewise. Self-driving vehicles are trivial when you stick 'em on rails, there's a big chunk of the cargo industry gone. Longshoreman-free ports, all that and more.

Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.

Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.

> Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment.

I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.

I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.

But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.

Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.

OK so 100+ years, then? I think my favorite part of this is the fully automated global doomsday system.

No clue but the “robots sweep the park” part is imminent.

We haven’t done it yet only because we require people to do menial labor for shit wages so they don’t starve.

Heck, several local restraints have done away with most wait staff. You sit down and order via a web site.

If by "we" you mean Washington, DC - I guess I could believe that since it's one of the highest per-capita income cities in the world. But park sweeping robots are nowhere near reality for most cities in the US, let alone the rest of the world.