you: "Yeah I lost my job, but hey, now someone in India gets to earn a living...can you help me prop up my cardboard box to keep the rain out? thanks."
Jobs are not a finite resource. If there is a pool of people who want to work, someone will find stuff to pay them to do.
I seriously would love for my entire current set of job responsibilities to be automated. There are a couple of value-adding full-time jobs' worth of work I could be doing for my employer that are just being left on the table right now.
Well this is just absolutely untrue. If there's a pool of people who want to work then someone will just give them a job? what kind of magical unicorn world are you living in? So in your world unemployment rates just...don't exist or are a fabrication? those people are just lazy?
If you got fired from your job and you couldn't find another one, in your head, whose fault is that? yours? the mythical job provider who hasn't blessed you with another?
If I ran a business and was provided the option of hiring you or someone in another country for peanuts, I'd tell you to kick grass.
But you want to work I hear you say! someone HAS to pay me to do something! nope, I'm not going to pay you, I'm going to pay this kid in India or his brother that just got off the plane half of what I would have to pay you.
There will always be some level of unemployment (a percentage of people who want job a won't have found one), but if automation made the unemployment rate permanently go up, all the people who used to hand knit socks who lost jobs to powered looms, all the people who used to drive plows with oxen who lost jobs to combines, all the blacksmiths who lost jobs to powered forges, and equivalent percentage of the population for subsequent generations forever would remain unemployed. And yet, somehow, subsequent generations have managed to mostly find jobs.
I agree it sucks that anyone would lose their job, but why is the default of people in the "west" having well paid, air conditioned jobs, and other people getting those jobs stealing from them.
Since we're discussing the default, I'd assume average NYC everything. If a restaurant can't afford to pay minimum wage for the area, then I wouldn't assume their business is a good use of space.