"Full automation" is somewhat independent of artificial general superhuman intelligence. Full automation requires good robots and a good solution to unstructured manipulation, but not unusually high intelligence. Near full automation may lead to the permanent underclass scenario.
Consider near full automation of Amazon. A shipping container is unloaded from a ship by a robotic crane, which places it on a robotic transport platform. The transport platform moves the container to a container stacking area, where another robotic crane puts it on the container stack. Later, a truck pulls up to a truck dock, and the stacking crane loads a container onto it. This is all standard procedure at the more advanced ports today.
Currently, there's a bit of human intervention at this point where a human has to set the twist-locks that lock the truck to the container. That's a good job for a humanoid robot. Then the truck drives off. The truck could be self-driving right now; that's being demoed. The truck drives to a fulfillment center and backs into the dock. Unloading robots and forklifts unload the truck. That's been demoed, but doesn't work well yet. The contents of the truck go onto conveyors.
Next comes something that hasn't been automated yet - opening boxes and separating the contents. That's an unstructured manipulation problem. There's slow progress in that area. Once separated, scanned, and put into totes or bins, the incoming products go into the robotic storage system, something Amazon warehouses have had working for years.
When an order comes in, no humans are involved in the "paperwork", of course. That's been automated for a long time now. Eventually, the robotic storage system, Kiva-type robots, rolls a rack of bins up to a pick station. Right now, humans pick an item out of a bin and drop it into an output bin. Indicator lights and a laser pointer tell them what to do. Training time for that job is about one minute. Amazon has tested robots for it, but so far they are not cost-effective.
A conveyor takes the filled bin away to a packing station, where all products are re-scanned, packed into a box, labelled, and sent onto an outgoing conveyor. That's currently manual, but soon...
At the shipping end, boxes are stacked and go into trucks, something that's been automated a bit for years and isn't far from total automation. The trucks will soon be self-driving and will head off to either a shipping company or a local distribution center. At the local distribution center, boxes come out of big trucks and go into smaller trucks for delivery. Today this is manual with conveyors, but it's not too far from being automated.
Delivery trucks will soon be self-driving. The final meters from truck to door are where humanoid robots might be useful. Once humanoid robots cost less than a car, this looks cost-effective. If they work.
Everything here is either working or has been demoed. Who needs people?
>Who needs people?
Every company needs customers.
Until we jump off the deep end and give machines the personhood required for them to legitimately earn and spend their own income (as opposed to managing assets owned by humans), customers are people.
Ergo, companies need people.
That entire story needs a customer demanding the widget.
Who needs people? Clearly the one selling something. (Unless they switch to the robot market.)
All of this is pointless if you dont have consumer purchasing power. Or unless the only thing getting transported are materials for compute, resource extraction and power.