The workforce already HAS been replaced by automtion. Several times over.

A few short centuries ago over 90% of us worked in the fields. That is now mechanized and less than 5% of us have to do that backbreaking labour. Last century the big employer was factories. That's now mostly automated. In another century people will shake their heads and wonder how anyone could have endured life as a long-haul truck driver or a fry cook. We'll find other stuff to do.

The economy will require a fuckload of transformation. Probably a lot more redistribution which will be both enabled and necessitated by the explosion in productivity. Whether the result still gets called 'capitalism' is largerly just labelling. What we call 'capitalism' today is wildly different from what we meant in 1930 which is ridiculously far from 1776 when The Wealth of Nations was published.

Hell we refer to the USA, China, France, and Colombia as "capitalist" -- those are wildly different systems.

I think the various industrial revolutions we’ve been through are different from the current robotic revolution we’re going through.

The previous ones basically made Very hard work easier and products cheaper...mass production hurt “craftsmen” but it created a much larger market due to reducing cost, the larger market required more laborers to assist machinery. The robotic revolution will/is replacing the need for human workers entirely in almost every portion of the economy.

I think we’re already near the bottom of how cheap manufactured goods can be, and the massive concentration of wealth at the top (with requisite loss of wealth at the bottom) is an indicator that this handwaving away the issue with “future jobs we can’t imagine yet” isn’t happening. It honestly sounds the same as oil lobbyists saying we don’t need to curb oil consumption because “future technologies” will fix it.

I guess time will tell. It's such an enormous complex change, and there are so many variables -- we don't _really_ know how robotics, nanotech, biotech, quantumtech are going to pan out. I read in the New Yorker somewhere that income inequality has gotten to just around the worst levels of the Gilded Age... will it provoke enough reaction that something is done about it, or break politics so bad that nothing is done? Time will tell.

"We'll find other stuff to do."

There's a reasonable chance that we'll get shot by robots.