You don't have to agree with me; economics hands you your ass. The Romans invented stamped metal coins but not movable type not because they were fucking idiots but because when you could use slaves as scribes it's cheaper to have someone write shit out by hand. Vestiges of the Ottoman Empire have a hand-crafted work ethic because theirs was a patronage-based society where Pashas had a responsibility to keep their underlings non-idle. The Ottomans didn't not invent Jaquard looms because they were fucking idiots but because if they idled all their weavers they'd have been destroyed in rebellion. Why did Gutenberg "invent" the movable type press? because the fucking Black Death and Hundred Years War. Scribes were in high demand so mechanization took over.

So yeah - someone will capitalize on that surplus... but if it's cheaper to get robots to do it than to pay humans $4 an hour, that surplus labor starts replacing robots at $3 an hour.

We've had industrial robots for 40 years now. They replaced steel workers that made middle class livings. We're just now starting to roll out fruit-picking robots. They're competing with $6/day labor. But then, it's a Japanese bot, where strawberries go for $5 a pint, rather than the $2 or less they get in the US. That robot's going to have to come down in order to compete in the US, but when it does, strawberry pickers will either (A) make less than $6 a day or (B) cease to work because let's be honest: there's not a lot of retraining available for strawberry pickers as they aren't exactly trained to begin with. They're not doing it for the love of the job. They're doing it because it's available.

What I DON'T want, is Walmart and their cynical corporate cronies to be allowed to pay less than a living minimum wage, because then the company pockets my money that should be going to the social safety net that supports my fellow Americans who genuinely need it to get through tough times.

Real world example:

I have a 2300 sqft birth center. Right now we have a lovely Russian couple that cleans the bathroom we share with the dentist once a week. I have a quote from them to hit the whole birth center and clean everything twice a week for, I believe, $140 a month. That's sixteen man hours for $140 which ain't minimum wage.

Me? I'd like to have the place a little cleaner and I keep toying with buyin' a skookum Roomba. But the skookum Roomba for that size space is $900. I'm at six months to amortize that price and the thing ain't gonna scrub toilets, polish door handles or dust. But you know what? At $240 a month I'm buyin' the damn Roomba.

And the Russians ain't workin'. Anything I do, they ain't workin'. Guaranteed - they're overqualified to be cleaning my toilets already. But what they are qualified to do? People are already doing that.

Yeah. Jobs disappear and jobs appear. The fallacy is assuming that the new jobs are somehow open to the old jobholders 'cuz they fuckin' ain't, they never have been, and the premise that they are is one of the main excuses free market fuckers use to help themselves sleep at night.