Yes it is a true statement. But when one person can maintain a system that replaced 40,000 workers you have a problem. Human population has to shrink, it is growing faster than the capacity of our civilizations to absorb them in a productive way. In nature, when there are too many lemmings in the population for the amount of food/shelter exist they commit mass suicide. The population numbers get corrected to sustainable levels and all is well. Our Mass suicide is big world wars/genocides. We will need another big world war to correct the excesses.
Lemmings have been proved to not commit mass suicide. Disney made a movie about them long ago that showed that but it turned out it was all staged. If humans die, then so do consumers, which decreases the overall workers to produce stuff etc It's not a solution. But the topic is a very interesting one. Think of it this way instead: If technology is so advanced that it puts 50% of the population out of work, isn't that a good thing? For capitalism it's bad, because if you don't work, you starve to death. But if those 50% unemployed OWNED the super advanced technology, they'd be getting the benefits of technology - free! No more need to work. If one day robots ran everything and grew all our food and made clothe, theoretically humanity would be perfect and no one would need to work ever again. But under capitalism, if the workers couldn't find work, they couldnt sustain themselves, irregardless of the fact that the robots made everything needed to support them. So ultimately as technology improves and drives people out of work, we need to rethink what the goal of life should be. Is it to work, or is it to enjoy life?
I'm calling bs on your assessment of the labour situation in the 2000's as a UW grad myself ('04 Chem Eng) I definitely recall the bottom falling out of coop placements for 1 round of work terms in 2002 that scared all of the CS and EE kids shitless .... mind you they probably needed to be slapped back to reality after making $30/hr 4 months into their univ careers on their 1st work term to download Limp Bizkit songs on Napster while tugging it at their cubicles at Nortel and RIM. Anyway when grad time came in '04 my friends in Comp & Elec ppl did well on average in terms of finding jobs. Personally had good friends taking jobs in San Jose/Palo Alto in tech. Some Elec and Sys Design friends balked at IT stuff and went into the energy sector - a long term slam dunk looking back at it. I know our Chem class did very well. Even the muppets were able to find jobs within 6 months of grad. I would say when you include grad school kiddies, over 90% of the class was either hired or pursuing more education. The hiring was spread over a bunch of sectors, obvy oil & gas were the big hitters. Someone (apparently) bright as yourself should give up on the IT jobs, learn the basics of Fluid Mechanics and leverage that into a job doing CFD work for energy companies ...... you would easily have enough of a mathematical aptitude for it.