Meet the future of burger flipping.

[davmat787]

Welcome to the 21st century. Automation can and will continue to eliminate jobs. It may create 1 skilled job in engineering or machine maintenance for every 5 it eliminates, but the math is inexorable.

The problem with the OP's point is that it is inevitable. Even if you don't bother raising the minimum wage or increasing their salaries, eventually the machines will be more cost-effective. Maybe not if they work for $1/hr but this isn't the third world and no-one can live off that.

Machines doing check out at grocery stores, chat-boxes handling customer service, robots cleaning houses. They only improve over time.

Since the elimination of jobs through automation cannot be avoided in the future, the long term question is what happens to all these people who are out of jobs.

But hasn't this been an issue (or problem depending on your POV) since at least the industrial revolution? Machinery was invented that negated, or at least reduced, the need for workers to manufacture products.

Between 1811 and 1816 the Luddites destroyed machinery that threatened their textile producing jobs.

I guess the difference is back then the jobs stayed in country rather than outsourced to China, Bangladesh, or wherever.

So my point is that new technology and machinery that increases productivity while reducing the required headcount is nothing new. It would be interesting to look at what sectors lost a large percentage of jobs due to automation and what happened to those people.