I keep hearing people say this... yet I'm confused. The operational goal of companies (and industry) as a whole is to continually increase efficiency to reap more profits.

If you take a step back, and just look at the entire machine, it seems frivolous for any industry to make investments in technology, given that your statement is true.

The big telecom I worked for was trying to automate their customer service, I highly doubt they would make the investment in the technology if they expected rehire the equivalent amount of layoffs.

Anyway, if I'm off point or misunderstanding some key mechanism at play, I'd love to be a bit more enlightened, because your opinion seems to be the dominant one.

The idea is that they or other businesses will spend their new surplus on hiring workers to do what can't be automated.

This would have to be in a different industry though, no? Inherently the point of automation is to shrink the amount of labor required to do a task. So as to your comment and in my example of customer service, employees laid off from company A would need to acquire technical skills to manage the new automation in that industry (likely that company B has already, or will adopt), or move to a different industry completely.

The problem I see is that everyone is automating though. Or is it assumed that enough tasks can't be automated to actually effect unemployment?

It could be. The surplus flows to the owners of the company.

They can choose to a) re-invest it in the company, creating new jobs there, b) re-invest it in new/other companies, creating new jobs there, c) spend it, creating new jobs wherever the money is spent.

But yes, retraining is generally required to some degree -- as jobs become more productive, people need to learn how to do those jobs!

Pretty much this.

After all, if you're creating value, I don't think you can go wrong in the grand scheme of things. Destroyed (usually more tedious) jobs means people as a whole are now free to do more interesting and creative tasks.

I'd happily destroy my job of doing the dishes with a dishwasher (one that fills and empties itself too) by automating it, etc.

The problem is that the nature of the new problems we create that necessitate new jobs are fundamentally more challenging for humans to solve than the problems that have been automated away. There will always be jobs to be performed. The problem is if there will be enough humans capable enough to perform the jobs that still need doing.

We like to think that the industrial and agricultural revolutions created as many jobs as it destroyed. However, while it did do that for humans, the horses were not quite as lucky. Many hundreds of thousands of horses were put out of work permanently between the end of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century.

What makes people think that humans are too special to avoid the fate of horses?

A well presented point, I didn't think of it that way. You're probably right.

Even so, at this time I want the human race to progress forward (to be more advanced, better capable at surviving even if a meteor is headed towards Earth or from rogue destructive humans, etc.), even if that means the people with less skills will suffer.

Like it or not, life is about competition. Personally, I strive to improve myself and get better every day. I prefer to solve more challenging problems rather than keep doing tedious work. I wouldn't want the human race to stagnate its progress just because of fear that least-skilled members of our race cannot keep up.

Besides, if enough things become automated, perhaps we will have less work to do in order to maintain comfortable lifestyles. Maybe that won't happen, I'm not sure.

Anyway, that's my current view off the top of my head.

After finding some way to be retrained. And good luck getting back into the job market if you're 50 and have been displaced from an industry you've worked in for most of your life.

(It creates new jobs, but it doesn't necessarily mean the displaced get those new jobs.)