How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work. Sometimes people forget that the workers are also consumers. You may displace some, but to replace all, blue and white? Not that easy.
>How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work.
The idea is that you sell your stuff to people who are employed in other industries/companies that haven't been so successful at automating all their employees out of a job.
At Samsung, for instance, the workers are not the main consumers: Samsung is a huge exporter, and most of their customers are outside of Korea. Even if all their current and former employees suddenly decided to stop buying Samsung products, it wouldn't even be noticeable in their balance sheet.
What you're describing is a situation where all the companies have managed to eliminate most of their workforces, which has never happened. If it comes even remotely close to that point, societies will be forced to change their economies somehow, perhaps with UBI.
This is the theme of the "Twenty-fourth Voyage of Ijon Tichy" by Stanisław Lem. Goods are mass-produced but no one has income to buy them. In the end they asked AI to find the way out of this deadlock. The AI found the solution of crushing them all and arranging their remains in visually aesthetic patterns. Funniest part is that they voluntarily went along with this plan because they could see no other.
The whole "Star Diaries" series is such a gem. Many stories are exploring this question of "what is the endgame for societal trajectory X" in a form of some remote planet that Tichy visits on his trip.
How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work. Sometimes people forget that the workers are also consumers. You may displace some, but to replace all, blue and white? Not that easy.