Point still stands though.
I've written a lot of MS Office macros that replaced people - immediately they became the person who ran the macro while other things were looked for that they could do, then a month later they were gone. The entirety of a lot of people's $30k/yr jobs is taking digital data from one source and entering it into a different program. $30k/yr is a lot of money.
I've seen it so often that it actually soured me to the work.
edit: This is exactly the kind of thing that I would work on. It could clearly be reduced to a .csv, template image, and a few Imagemagick calls.
Another way to think of automation is that you're making it $30k/yr cheaper to run a business. The more automated the world becomes, the cheaper it becomes to start (useful, profitable) businesses--and so the more likely people are to start them.
Or, to put it another way: to whatever degree social mobility is enabled in a culture (and to whatever degree people realize "start a business" is an option to escape unemployment), automation converts a culture's proletariat wage-earners into bourgeois capital-holders. This process is lossy--it also outputs non-adaptive workers on welfare--but if the exchange is recognized at a cultural/governmental level, it can be optimized through education and incentive programs to produce more entrepreneurs and fewer non-productive workers.
And the less employed people would be out there to buy your stuff.
Sorry, but automation either ultimately leads to something like communism or similar, or to a severy damaged market economy.
The only reason neither has happened thus far is because we haven't achieved nearly total automation, actually not even for 10-20% of the jobs. And still, what there has been have led to a shrinking middle class compared to decades past.
>it can be optimized through education and incentive programs to produce more entrepreneurs and fewer non-productive workers.
The only reason entrepreneurs are "productive" is because there are workers (either productive or non-productive) that have salaries to buy their stuff and services.