We don't need to automate everything, and we most certainly won't any time soon, but the Great Depression happened with only 25% unemployment. Besides you are now changing your argument. Before you were saying that new jobs would be created to replace the old. Now you are saying that we won't even be losing that many jobs to automation. That is a worthy discussion to have but it hasn't been the one we have been engaged in.
I haven't changed a single argument, my argument is that automation does not cause structural unemployment. The great depression is a great case-study for economics and the role of government, but it doesn't have anything to do with technological unemployment.
You just can't resist the old "Well it worked out before so it will work now" argument can you, no matter how much you insist you aren't. The Luddite Fallacy simply doesn't apply and I've shown you multiple reasons why. The most prominent of which is that the marginal cost of products and services for the new technologies is near zero. You totally failed to even acknowledge that point.
Once again, my point was that your argument is not new, not that because it has always worked it will always work. The reason why it has always worked is because of the economics, which you fail to acknowledge.
Your argument presumes that specific low marginal cost products and services are the only result of new technologies and that is demonstrably false. We have an immense amount of technology and automation today, along with significant population growth and increased quality of life. Yet we are still at 5.5% unemployment. When does your magical technological unemployment kick in? What exactly is going to change? Detail the exact process, don't just drop a whole mess of automation into the current world without detailing the path that got you there.
The 12 year olds who are programming are the ones who have the aptitude for it. There are plenty more who don't. You know, all those people in jobs that are likely to be automated.
Web site creation and app development can literally be done with drag and drop by anyone. Not every problem solved of course, but the point is technology ultimately increases the productivity of the people, it doesn't replace people.
Furthermore, quickly find me a 12 year old who doesn't know how to use a smart phone, because I can find you elderly who cannot by the boatloads.
How about the fact that real wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s ?
A problem that has nothing to do with technological unemployment. De-regulations, destruction of collective bargaining, reducing the progressive tax system, ...
Or how about the fact that the unemployment rate of people who have given up looking or who had to settled for part time has grown relative to the base unemployment rate
Where do you see any growth relative to base unemployment rate? All of those lines follow the exact same path of ups and downs, increasing during recessions followed by decreases. U6 is down from 12% in 94 to 11% in 2015. Showing the long-term trend still remaining steady...
I am saying that it will become a problem in 10-20 years.
Detail it, don't just hypothesize there is a problem and then demand everyone else is wrong. I've already proven that it is impossible to accurately model markets, and yet you demand that you can accurately model it to know technological unemployment is a decade or two away. When I laugh at your assertion without proof, and compare you to the centuries worth of people arguing the same exact thing, you try to defend it by accusing me of arguing that historical trends never change.
There is a reason why it hasn't happened for the centuries that it has been argued, and it's because economics is driven by people and so it continues, unemployment rates fluctuate by small amounts over the short-term and remain relatively stable over the long-term as GDP and quality of life increase.
The burden of proof is on you, who is coming in and demanding that the entire economy and the basic fundamental properties of economics are about to be completely modified. Your technology is not special, it increases spending power which goes right back into growing the economy, which grows jobs. It's cyclical because that is how economies work, it's a feedback loop, and you've done absolutely nothing to demonstrate that the feedback loop is in any inherent danger.
There is plenty of technology that is coming up that will eliminate millions of jobs like self driving cars, and IBM's Dr. Watson.
There has always been and will always be technology coming up that will "eliminate" jobs over the long-term. Self driving cars on the public roads alongside you and I however could be 30-50 years away to even begin to be sold to the public. Urban driving and inclement weather still pose huge problems for the technology.
But after the tech become viable it will provide such economic saving that its use will balloon.
Technology has always worked in a trickle down manner, but you are arguing for an entirely new type of economics, I would love to read your thesis on it all works.