“Service jobs have picked up. Lots of service jobs are good paying, like realtors or medical workers.”
“Making everything far more productive is a good problem to have.”
Many other service jobs pay pathetic wages. I think you are glossing over reality here. I would really hate to be a young person starting out in this economy. This is not really comparable to the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution. Someone else posted a remark about jobs REPAIRING robots but what I expect is that robots will build robots and robots will repair robots. As far as medical jobs what reason is there to believe that robots cannot take over those jobs too? I am not suggesting that we can go back to the old days, I just don’t see how all this is necessarily going to lead to paradise on Earth.
There is a natural feedback effect.
If there is no one to buy the products produced at automated factories, then the factories go out of business.
There is no point in having robots make things that no one buys.
There have always been short term dislocations, and that is the biggest problem, if change happens very fast, the dislocations are harsher. One sixth of the economy is now in medical care, and most of those jobs are hard to automate. Maybe it will climb to one third.
I do not know, but the more we try to control things, the more likely we are to make mistakes.
I do not like the idea of a guaranteed income. Maybe we could guarantee low paying, subsidized jobs, that everyone would like to get out of...
You are looking a long, long way out when you are talking about those levels of robots building and repairing robots, including to the level of obviating the need for doctors and other medical professionals.
Also, a good part of why the low-skill service jobs are cheap is because we have taken in 10’s of millions of low-skill, largely illegal laborers. This has both pulled down wages via competition for those jobs and staved off the investments in technology that would make those jobs more productive and thus more valuable.