We've replaced human jobs in the past not just made them more efficient. Horses (and all the jobs to do with them) were completely displaced by cars. Those jobs aren't more efficient, they're gone. Similar with many other jobs during the industrial revolution.

This is not a zero sum game. For an economy to exist we need consumers. For consumers to exist we need people to have jobs and be paid. So the equilibrium is that there will be some new jobs somewhere, not done by robots, that will pay people enough to consume the (better and cheaper) goods made by those robots. Or we'll just have a lot of leisure time and get paid by the government. Or (like some other discussion thread) we'll all be wiped out or slaves in the salt mines if the elites can just sustain/improve without us and are able to enforce it. Either way, it's not the scenario where we're out of jobs sitting at home.

> This is not a zero sum game. For an economy to exist we need consumers.

I think that's really unimaginative and not thinking about it right. If you control the basic resources and own the tools needed to convert those into whatever you want, why does the "economy" even matter? If you can get anything you want without needing anything from the other 95% of people, having "consumers" in the sense you're thinking doesn't matter any more.

I think your percentage might be off by a decimal, make it 0.5% and broligarchs. Maybe that's why they've gone crazy with spending trillions in the AI bubble, trying to position themselves as far up the chain as possible. 99.5% of humans will be wasted resource sinks to them and seen as "unnecessary"

There have always been some people powerful or rich enough to control the resources and tools needed for whatever they want yet the equilibrium has never been what you describe.