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> If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses.

The problem is that roughly half the population is fighting against this kind of social welfare system and they would only be encouraged by PG's blog post.

Replacing menial work with automation frees up the people doing the menial work to learn new skills and do other work

Or, importantly, to do menial work on things that were previously considered not as important or productive as what they were doing menial work on.

People always assume retraining means you have to learn a technological job or something else absurdly out of reach. A lot of the time it just means doing the same or similar thing you were doing, but in another context that has now become relatively valuable enough to devote labor to now that this other thing don't require it.

And, as you hint, being able to create a lot of value without a lot of ongoing cost is a pretty key step towards basic income (of which the "leisure economy" is really just a more extreme example). Having that would indeed offset the issues of those who can't or won't transfer skills.

This makes perfect sense, if you think of a society "spending" people rather than "employing" them. If you can quit spending people on trivial jobs, you've got more people to spend on worthwhile jobs. They work they do will make society better off as a whole. But to get there, we have to free them from the jobs where they would contribute much less - where they would be wasted.