The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes.
The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.
> The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago
access to housing is incredibly expensive. Measuring their purchasing power for how many scented candles they can buy is pretty meaningless when they are much closer to homelessness than ever before.
Land is one thing you can't automate the production of, and construction still consists mostly of manual skilled labor. But I think despite that you'll find housing today still compares very favorably to housing 100 years ago (in terms of median square footage, safety, amenities, etc).
> The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes.
The people who are "automated away" and have reduced income are also less of a consumer. In a society where most jobs are automated, who are the consumers?
You've spent your whole life living in a society where that's already happened. 1000 years ago nearly everyone was employed in agriculture. Now nearly all those jobs are automated.
So you tell me: where are the consumers? Why aren't we all unemployed and unable to afford to buy anything now that those agriculture jobs have been automated away? Or did we find other productive activities to spend our time on?
This sentiment is constantly echoed on this site -- "just look at past times where tech removed jobs, this is no different". But the difference now is that we will soon have super-humans in terms of intelligence, dexterity (robots), and cost (cheaper, no healthcare, etc.).
I put the onus on the yay-sayers, can you name a job that a human can do that this new AI / robot cannot (or will not soon) do? Otherwise, I think its time to stop drawing false equivalence with agriculture, luddites, etc. Those were "narrow" machines, incapable of coding, writing a symphony, or working in a factory. In the next decade we're talking about building a better human.
I think a better example is to draw a parallel to horses. There is nothing left for them to do; we keep a few around for sport and entertainment, as a novelty. At one time, they were indispensible, but there's no rule that any organism (including humans) has infinite economically viable uses. At some point, everything worth doing (economically) might be automated to the point that human labor no longer makes sense (and hence we have high unemployment). There is no cosmic law written that "if jobs are replaced by tech, new jobs shall fill the space!" Just look at areas in the rust belt where literally nothing replaced the lost jobs -- there is just rampant unemployment, black market dealing / drugs, and despair.
That's a very different argument about a hypothetical future problem that may or may not ever actually materialize. (I'd argue given the current trajectory of AI it probably won't for the foreseeable future.)
But yes, if we develop artificial superinteligence to the level where humans become literally useless (e.g. we don't just automate 90% of everything, but 100%, and there's actually no tasks left in the world that humans can do better or cheaper than computers) then assuming humanity survives we'll need a different economic system for distributing the nearly-unlimited resources resulting from that. Probably in that situation the best thing to do would be to ask the AI to design our new economic system, since it would obviously do a better job at that than any human.
Couldn't it get a lot worse much sooner than that? Even if a handful of industries collapse, its not clear we have more jobs for 100M displaced workers. I just haven't seen any proposals of what that future looks like that seem good, but I do hear "don't worry more jobs will appear". But can anyone say where 50-100M workers will go? All the answers I think of or see seem like things that can easily be automated.
The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.