And all this automation has resulted in a US unemployment rate of 4.1%, the lowest in over 17 years.
Yeah, I have to admit, I have never heard concerns about massive numbers of displaced humans during an era of near-record low unemployment.
And the labor market has changed dramatically. Factory labor is way down, and health care is way up. Average wages have been stagnant, even declining, for a long time. Some kinds of work will never be done by machines. Child care and patient care probably are among them. But as machines take over more and more work that used to require humans, unemployment and underemployment will get worse.
And we are seeing that already.
For starters, those unemployment figures are grossly misleading, since, at least in the US, only those who are actively seeking work are counted as unemployed. Those who have given up seeking work, those who are on some sort of government assistance program, those who are making their living from the black market, and so on, are not counted as the unemployed.
Further, they don't include people worldwide, many of whom are seeing much greater rates of unemployment, even in the developed world. It's essentially cherry picking your data.
Even assuming those numbers are accurate and valid, they're still a historical blip. Unemployment has the tendency to swing wildly with changes to the nature of unemployment. When we had the swing from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial economy, there was rampant unemployment as the population re-trained and re-educated itself to work in the paradigm. Similarly, when the US economy began to shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, there was rampant unemployment, which is finally starting to lessen. In both cases, a new economic model provided new jobs to replace the old ones. An economy where
all labour, or as close as dammit, is provided by automation will simply not have sufficient jobs available for its population to migrate to.
But even that ignores the extent of the true problem with these unemployment figures. Even with the low numbers, a great deal of those employed are employed near or below the poverty line. Workers at many of the giant corporations -- Amazon, Walmart, etc. -- already have wages so low that they are dependent on government assistance for their survival. Many people who are regularly employed still find themselves unable to afford shelter (living in their cars, couch surfing, etc.), unable to afford medical care, and in many cases even unable to avoid food without the government assistance programs that cause so many free-marketeers to whinge about "socialism" taking away their money.
And even with employees who are little different from indentured servants or slaves, these companies are still working very hard to automate their businesses and eliminate these employees entirely. Amazon has already made great strides in doing so.
So what we will see is as automation increases, we will have increasing numbers of people who simply have no way to support themselves, and as others have already noted, will end up either with a collapsing economy and society, or with a massive paradigm shift to a post-scarcity economy and social structure that many right-wing reactionaries decry with the label "socialism", as if it's some sort of looming boogeyman poised to destroy all the hold near and dear (well, it might be, since it would strip them of their life-and-death power over other humans).
We already, at this point in history, have the technology to finally begin the migration to a post-scarcity economy and culture, where extreme poverty is eliminated and everyone is guaranteed of at least the basics of survival and reasonable comfort. We already have the energy technology, and we have the beginnings of the labour technology. But so far, as a world, those with the ability to make this happen lack sufficient vision and political will to start that process. Hell, most of us lack even the political will to stop the rapid degeneration and destruction of our environment, or to reform a culture of rampant bigotry, and too many still consider beliefs in the wrong imaginary beings as sufficient justification for bloody conflict and genocide. We have the ability to end a great deal of the suffering in the world, but don't seem to have much interest in doing so.
