What happened when automation came for farmers' jobs? They went to work in factories. The result was that we had at least as much food as before, but we also had cars and refrigerators and washing machines.

Don't think of jobs as employing people. Think instead of society spending people on jobs. When we didn't have to spend a third of our people on growing food, we were able to spend them on manufacturing, and society was better off. If we don't have to spend as many on manufacturing, we're able to spend more of them on computer programming, and society is better off. If we can automate less-valuable work, we can spend our people on more valuable work.

For any individual person without a job, this isn't necessarily a good deal. "You lost the thing you knew how to do, now you have to go learn how to do something harder." That's uncomfortable. We as a society need to do better at helping them learn the next thing.

But the concern seems to be that we're going to run out of "next things". What if there's no work to be done? I don't think we're close to getting there. It's like the farmer wondering what will happen when the factories have produced a car for everyone, and so there's no need for factory workers any more - not knowing that factories are going to produce more than cars, and that factory work isn't the final stage of the economy.