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Here's the key takeaway: "automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies—whether they’re fired,

• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > This is similar to my own thoughts on automation - it doesn't have to directly destroy a single job to lead to huge adverse impacts on our modern economics systems. Automation just has to be available and capitalism will take care of the rest over time. I'd argue automation doesn't lead to adverse impacts, capitalism does. Automation leads to greater output from the same labor input, which is good. Capitalism that is not mitigated in these effects leads to the more than 100% of the net benefit of those gains going to capital owners or those on combination with workers skilled in automation-related fields, while a net detriment is received by workers whose prior function, or a substitute for that function, was automated. But that's true of every change under capitalism that shifts demand from one kind of labor to another (but is felt most broadly detrimentally when the labor benefitting is of a type where skill is more concentrated.) The problem isn't automation, it is distributional infelicities in capitalism which must be mitigated by reducing (but not erasing) the concentrated benefits so as to allow broadly-shared benefits instead of broad harms.