I remember a story from a book (could've been Innovator's Dilemma, I don't remember), where he said that around 1900's I believe, they needed 200 humans to do a job, like carrying a big lumber from a cargo ship. Then cranes came about, and they could do the same job with just a handful of people, because most of the physical work was replaced by a crane.
Fast forward to today, and we have to have done alright by replacing those jobs. As long as robots are not smarter than us and can't think for themselves, I believe there will still be plenty more jobs in the future to go around. There could literally be invented hundreds or thousands of jobs by the end of this century.
Robots making iPhones is not some kind of huge milestone that could put humanity on the verge of collapse. Automation already exists for making cars for example. The net result of that was positive. This is just another transition.
I don't know if it's true that we've done alright. Realistically speaking, if you were employing 200 people to do something, and you can replace that job with ten people with ten cranes, you should be able to keep on paying 190 people — less the cost of the cranes — to stay at home and not work. Instead the difference goes into the pocket of the employer, and 190 people need to find new jobs or starve to death.
This is the pattern we need to break. The problem is that the only economically feasible system in the long run is some kind of welfare state — at some point food will become so cheap that we have to give people free food — but it's absolutely politically infeasible to even talk about the ways that might be good.
But if that ends up happening anyway (people finding other jobs), then what is wrong with it? Should we stop progress because we want everyone to keep their current jobs for life?
The only "problem" that is see with this is when these shifts are on a massive scale and happen in a very short term. Because it has the potential to leave a lot of people unemployed before there is an alternative for them. So Governments might be able to help there with free training programs for jobs that are in demand and on a growth trend.
If I look at the trends in the past, to me it seems automation has always led to more jobs. In the industrial revolution, 25 million jobs were lost, but 44 million were created. So you should always look at it from that point of view. The industrial revolution led to the progress of mankind, and it did kill a lot of jobs back then, but it also ended up creating a lot of new ones, too.
It's not a problem in the short term— that is in the short term someone can find more work, sure. Maybe less skilled work, almost certainly worse paying work, but okay, they probably won't starve to death. And the benefits of industrialization make the economy as a whole grow, so their kids are actually better off. Great!
The problem is when we carry it out. As my ancestors discussed, we're going to reach a point where there just aren't more jobs. Or rather, a point where the value of the work done by robots essentially for free is so great that it completely dwarfs the value of whatever minor service labor is still done by humans, making human labor essentially valueless.
And thus the logical end result of mechanization, and one I'd argue we're starting to see already, is a world in which a) nearly everything, including food, is produced "for free" by largely self-sustaining robots, and b) nearly everyone on Earth has starved to death. That strikes most of us as, you know, just a little bit sideways.
I don't mean to come off as argumentative, and I certainly hope you're right. I just can't imagine the types of jobs people would pay for that could employ most of humanity in the age of robots.
The way I see it, the economy is set up to provide us with necessities (food, water, shelter), entertainment (physical devices, creative output), and to connect businesses to each other, to more efficiently provide for previous mentioned things. Food, water, shelter, and physical devices the robots have a lock on. And most B2B industries will become obsolete because everything is dirt cheap to make anyways. You'll still need people to design devices and people for the creative output.
The problem here is that creative output scales massively. It's a stretch to imagine an economy based solely on creative output. And you're still left with the problem of distributing the necessities. Only a handful of corporations will be responsible for producing the necessities. No one will have any "money" to buy them.
Fast forward to today, and we have to have done alright by replacing those jobs. As long as robots are not smarter than us and can't think for themselves, I believe there will still be plenty more jobs in the future to go around. There could literally be invented hundreds or thousands of jobs by the end of this century.
Robots making iPhones is not some kind of huge milestone that could put humanity on the verge of collapse. Automation already exists for making cars for example. The net result of that was positive. This is just another transition.