There's a thought error in here: "the economy", as an unmovable construct, does not really exist. As an example, a good shirt does not cost thousands of dollars anymore, because we have automated weaving looms and a whole textile industry. We're not poorer from it, though, because we shifted from weaving shirts to doing construction work or working in finance.
If we can automate simple manual labor, people will shift to different tasks; the non-beneficial changes is that now the energy needed for that task is consumed directly by the machine, and also the investment that has been done to get the machine there in the first place. Beyond that, people who did simple tasks before may perform tasks that require conscience or risk-awareness (for example, machines injuring or killing humans cannot be fired or fined, so someone has to be responsible), that require empathy and human attention; or people will resort to being burglars or robbers or revolutionaries or salesmen.
> We're not poorer from it, though, because we shifted from weaving shirts to doing construction work or working in finance.
the video specifically has a refutation for the argument you made - that technological improvement is not necessarily always augmented by better jobs that people could do. Their example with the horses and automobiles is quite pertinent.
The point about jobs that require human empathy is moot - if the cost of hiring the human is much higher than a machine, the machine will win.
You're arguing from a frame where there is a demand for a constant set of things ("jobs") and people capture the money that can be exchanged for that set of things. This assumes that a number of parameters in the market are fixed, and that you can "create" or "destroy" jobs with economic actions that are partly independent of the non-economic world.
Looking at historical economics, another way of looking at this is to see an economy as things going in (sunshine, non-renewable resources consumed, loot acquired in wars) and things going out (people eating, garbage produced, etc.), and the ways of distributing the flow between these.
It turns out that you can have a "surplus", when you suddenly have more money/resources than you had before. There are different means of getting rid of surplusses, including wars, social programs, or simply population growth (consider how New York's area used to sustain
about a hundred people).
Looking back at the demise of weaving and spinning as jobs, you see that the immediate effect of that was a higher concentration of wealth in the hands of some individuals, which (in Europe) led to counter-movements involving democratization and social issues.
The real problem is not that it's possible to find more effective ways to do some jobs than employing people for it, the real problem consists in the readjustment of power relationships that becomes necessary when you remove resposibilities from lots of people and put them in the hands of relatively few people.
Maybe some governments institute a robot tax, which augments the cost of robots by a percentage not high enough to consider other alternatives (e.g. moving off-shore, which has been possible with production jobs but not with manufacturing jobs), and use these funds towards things that society as a whole regards as beneficial (such as building nice parks, everyone getting a university degree, or every city having an opera and a theater, or war or terrorism or spying on your citizens, if those are what a society thinks it wants).
Standard "capitalist" economic doctrine wants us to believe that surplusses always belong to the innovators or those taking associated risks, and both historically and currently this has only been partly true. Maybe those surplusses will just be destroyed in the next "AI" bubble, maybe they will be used to create a post-democratic oppressive state, maybe they will be used to create a modern-day utopia. We don't know yet what will happen, but we sure should not let others reframe the issue as technocrats-vs-luddites, because that is not what it is.
> If we can automate simple manual labor, people will shift to different tasks
You aren't understanding the scenario, you're presuming there's always other tasks to switch to because you're presuming a labor based economy. This must change as AI will ensure there aren't other tasks to switch to, not enough for everyone anyway.
The scenario everyone else is discussing is what happens when there are more people than available jobs. That's the scenario you need to address; the answer is not just do another job.
If we can automate simple manual labor, people will shift to different tasks; the non-beneficial changes is that now the energy needed for that task is consumed directly by the machine, and also the investment that has been done to get the machine there in the first place. Beyond that, people who did simple tasks before may perform tasks that require conscience or risk-awareness (for example, machines injuring or killing humans cannot be fired or fined, so someone has to be responsible), that require empathy and human attention; or people will resort to being burglars or robbers or revolutionaries or salesmen.