[marron]

Because of the creative and entrepreneurial nature of people, there will always be jobs to be done. What robots do will free people up to pursue other more creative and inventive projects.

That, and things always have to be fixed.

Automation doesn’t dispense with people, it multiplies them, it allows a man to be a dozen men or a thousand men which frees other men to go after other goals. Automation, in the hands of free people, is a great boon.

[jjsheridan5]

Because of the creative and entrepreneurial nature of people, there will always be jobs to be done. What robots do will free people up to pursue other more creative and inventive projects ... That, and things always have to be fixed.

And when computers are better at creating and inventing new "projects"? And when computers can implement a person's idea with no substantive human involvement? And when computers can fix things better than a human can? These things are coming. Maybe not in the next couple of decades, but they are definitely in the pipeline.

But the more salient argument, often spoken, is that automation will simply open up demand, presumably in products/services that computers cannot implement at zero marginal cost. But that contention begs the question: why? While it is true that improvements in production have historically opened up new industries, there is actually no logical case that this will be true in the ongoing information revolution.

Any new demands will be more efficiently met by automated processes, and, when people can have access to a fully comfortable life without "work", how much incentive will they really have to labor just for those few things not provided by automation?