Baking bread has gone from an everyday job employing a significant fraction of the workforce to more of an artistic job that only a few people do. Bakers don’t really compete with mass produced bimbos, instead they offer a premium product for people who are willing to pay more.

I think it’s always like that when technologies get replaced. There are still people offering horse-drawn carriage rides, but it’s a specialty service now instead of a common job. Same with many of the things you find on Etsy.

Jobs being replaced by automation wouldn’t be a bad thing if the benefits were shared with the whole population and there were a social safety net for people whose jobs were eliminated. Unfortunately, the benefits always go to the people at the top. Some theorists have proposed economic systems where there are no people at the top, or where things are shared much more fairly. It’s a sad fact that those systems seem incompatible with human nature as it stands. Country-sized experimentation with anarchism or communism still leads to people at the top who take a lot more than they give. Those systems seem to work fine in small communities where everyone knows each-other. But, not when they are implemented in countries containing millions of people.

The most effective systems right now seem to be mixed socialist / capitalist systems where unions are strong and willing to call major strikes and shut the country down. You still get “haves” and “have nots”, but the “have nots” still get a voice and aren’t completely trampled by the rich.