Automation has never unemployed people, only persons. Specific categories of jobs are removed by automation, but these are replaced by other categories of jobs. Demand is created for the products of these jobs, and the whole machine keeps turning.
The consumer driven economy is built on artificial demand. The vast majority of 'stuff' bought is unnecessary. Without advertising and a culture that emphasises keeping up with the joneses we would see unemployment on a large scale, but our economy has adapted to fill the unemployment niches.
The real challenge is not how to prevent unemployment through automation. It is to find an alternate solution to artificially inflated demand which doesn't waste so much labor and materials producing goods and services which are strictly speaking unnecessary.
It's false to think that automation must create jobs, although it's a tautology that it does destroy/reduce parts of them.
Your argument essentially amounts to "this is how it's worked in the past (unemployed people have been able to find other categories of jobs), so it'll always work that way".
It's not automation that creates jobs, it's the incentives embedded in our socio-economic culture that create the replacement jobs for those that automation destroys.
When labor is freed up, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ it to make money. When production costs are lowered, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ the freed up capital. This is why so many companies are hiring at the same time as they are firing. Taken at a national or global scale, the result is that labor and capital follow supply and demand curves and that adjustments to the system through automation are compensated elsewhere through economic incentives.
Automation has never unemployed people, only persons. Specific categories of jobs are removed by automation, but these are replaced by other categories of jobs. Demand is created for the products of these jobs, and the whole machine keeps turning.
The consumer driven economy is built on artificial demand. The vast majority of 'stuff' bought is unnecessary. Without advertising and a culture that emphasises keeping up with the joneses we would see unemployment on a large scale, but our economy has adapted to fill the unemployment niches.
The real challenge is not how to prevent unemployment through automation. It is to find an alternate solution to artificially inflated demand which doesn't waste so much labor and materials producing goods and services which are strictly speaking unnecessary.