1) AI is Software. Marc was just a little off on market timing, and the eating starts for real right now.
2) I worked for a large private equity company on contract for a bit. The team I worked on was doing analysis about what the likely impact of AI, robotics, and automation on true unemployment in the US was likely to be as of 2030. Largely due to the impact on food service, retail, agriculture, customer support, and entry level corporate jobs the conclusion was that we'll see true unemployment in the 40% range at that time.
Unemployment in the 40% range is beyond total societal collapse. The unemployment rate in Ukraine is 11% and they are currently being invaded. Sudan's unemployment rate was still under 20% while they were in a civil war.
So the OP is probably using "unemployment rate" incorrectly. But if they are in fact using the International Labor Organization's definition, then this is probably a self-correcting problem. Society will collapse and those working on the research an implementation of AI and robotics will find themselves on the streets begging for scraps (or getting hacked up by machete-welding gangs), instead of working on building robots to displace workers long before they achieve success.
Don't underestimate what a strong leader can achieve with an army of starving people willing to do practically anything to feed their families.
This is a hard bet to take because we also don't know what other changes will take effect by then.
Perhaps the government reclassifies full-time employment to mean 24 hours/week. Now everyone can stay employed full-time, but the same number of human hours of work are getting done.
In any event, I don't think this will happen by 2030, but by 2040, absolutely.
Our economy would have to be truly ridiculous if having robots do 40% of the work was a bad thing. I mean, that means we have almost twice as many people available to do the stuff that couldn’t get automated! The most obvious solution would just be for everyone to work a little bit more than half as hard as they used to.
If you chop incomes in half, for example, Europe's various aging welfare states would quickly implode due to lack of tax revenue. Every advanced welfare state is built on tax revenue continuing to pour in. Many of the affluent nations in Europe are already struggling with demographics v tax revenue v welfare state needs, a rapid drop in income and it'd all go down quickly.
People to repair, direct, and organize the robots.
I mean, it's kind of a laughable example. Because we don't have humanoid robots today that can do anything meaningful in society, at any kind of meaningful scale. Without that, we are a far cry from having humanoid robots that can literally do everything.
Who said anything about humanoid robots? A humanoid form is generally a terrible form for a robot outside of a small handful of use cases (mostly centering around tending directly to humans).
I'll take the way under on that bet. Despite "software eating the world" there are currently protests in France about raising the retirement age. And we don't have enough workers in many industries (unemployment is at 3.5% in US). We're also facing a demographic cliff as baby boomers retire, so any automation we can get is desirable, in my opinion. But as the article mentions, robotics are far, far from replacing service industry jobs.
2) I worked for a large private equity company on contract for a bit. The team I worked on was doing analysis about what the likely impact of AI, robotics, and automation on true unemployment in the US was likely to be as of 2030. Largely due to the impact on food service, retail, agriculture, customer support, and entry level corporate jobs the conclusion was that we'll see true unemployment in the 40% range at that time.