I don't know about the economy making up for displaced jobs in the past, I figured automation will be unprecedented in that respect, but it seems to me that it could be problematic.

Ideally, everyone wins because more goods and services are being rendered for less labor. For it to be worse than it was before because of an increase in efficiency would mean the capitalistic system is hilariously, deeply flawed. Well, it's not hilarious I guess, I'm not laughing.

But it's imaginable -- getting paid for doing labor is the entire basis for money flow / distribution to the average person in a capitalistic economy. Take that away and the system could break. Hopefully it would merely have to adapt and change. We could learn to distribute wealth for free.

But would that work? If you can get everything you need or want for little to no effort, what's the incentive for those few people who would be needed and are able to design, build, maintain, power, etc. the machines to do that work? I guess they could just get paid more than the average person? If the country is still capitalistic, what's the incentive of the company to distribute profits to the masses? Would we have to switch to socialism? Maybe it's in the companies' best interest to distribute the wealth because, if the masses are broke, then there's nobody to buy their stuff? But how does that make sense, that the company would give away money just in order to get it back? Economics questions like this have always been beyond my ability to comprehend for some reason.

Incidentally I was just reading about this problem earlier today. https://www.cracked.com/article_28610_5-scary-questions-about-future-no-one-wants-to-ask.html Question #2