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No, it means that the opportunity cost of operating the robot for that job is higher than using it for some other job (maybe something that humans can't do) and the expected (economic) profit of paying you for the job is positive.
Let's go back to the simple example. Suppose that Person A is a robot. Hiring Person B over Person A for Job 2 means that the opportunity cost of using the robot for Job 2 is higher than the opportunity cost of hiring Person B over Person A for Job 1. Reducing the accounting cost of operating Person A to do Job 2 can change the rationality of using Person A for Job 2 over Job 1, but it doesn't change the comparative advantage of Person A for Job 1.
This is the same reason why high productivity countries like the US and Western Europe/Japan/etc. don't just produce everything. If I am the sole CEO of Nike and I can have my design team in Germany and my manufacturing team in Vietnam, even if my German team could do both better, it makes sense for me to invest in both countries. Insofar as I am using my German team to manufacture the clothing, I am not using them to design new apparel, production techniques etc., which is wasteful.
Or again, go back to the Terence Tao example. Suppose that he has an IQ of 300 rather than just 180 or whatever he has. Do you start hiring him to do your accounts now?
"Ah, but I'm talking about being able to produce lots of Terence Taos at a cheap cost." Ok then, but this increases society's capacity to pay more people to do work. And again, you could use those Tao clones to do your accounts... Or things that Tao can do and your accountant can't. Which is more rational?
What you need for automation to make humans redundant is a fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0 or lower. That could happen! For example, jobs could become so cognitively complex than you'd need an IQ of 150 just to keep up. That's why, even today in the developed world, it's extremely hard to get a job if you have an IQ below 80.
On the other hand, automation often increases the marginal productivity of labour. People who can cannot write coherent sentences and cannot do long multiplication can do what were once cognitively loaded jobs, due to tech like Grammarly, calculators, word processors etc.
The sensible conclusion is that we don't know. The sensible practical inference is that we should prepare for both outcomes. However, to do the latter, we need to actually understand the problem: it would be something like excess complexity in the workplace, not cheap robots.
If you can spin up a new Terrence Tao clone for $0.05 per hour, then no human who is not more capable than Terrence Tao in some dimension can earn more than $0.05 per hour. I would create enough Terrence Taos do do all the mathematics I want, and then create some more to do my accounting. The opportunity cost is the cost of the hardware it would take to run such a model, and hardware costs are already falling exponentially even without AI electrical engineers.
Automation increases society's capacity to pay people for work, but not the economic need to do so. The robots are being built and maintained by robots. The "critical point" I describe comes when anything that a sub-120-IQ can do, can also be done by a robot for $0.05 per hour.
"A fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0" is exactly what I'm talking about. Experientially, this looks like slowly raising the minimum IQ it takes to earn enough to survive until almost all people are excluded, and population massively shrinking as a direct result.
Increased labor productivity: advanced chess obituary. There comes a point where Human + AI is worse than AI alone. Rather, it's an anomaly when a human is able to meaningfully assist an AI to accomplish some task.
How much mathematics do you want to be done?
What do you mean?
No, it's a separate issue. We don't have to imagine a utopia of massive abundance, where there is cheap AI everywhere, in order to have a situation where the expected marginal productivity of a dangerously large proportion of humans falls below 0.
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