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There's an old probably apocryphal story about Henry Ford III taking the head of the UAW on a tour of his new automated factory and asking "Think you'll be able to get these robots to pay union dues?" to which the UAW head replied "Think you'll be able to get them to buy cars?"

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This hits on one of the most basic of economic principles which is often ignored. If the community becomes unemployed due to automation and is not reimbursed properly for the work done by the machine, then the community will not have the purchasing power to buy the goods produced by the machine. Thus rendering the machine useless.

True, but the real problem lies on the road from here to there. I.e. you could probably make half of the population totally unemployable while selling the output of robots to the other half. But will the first half just lie down and starve to death, or will they try to fight back? And, given the incentive structure of market economy, will we be able to get off this road altogether before reaching that point?

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