I should have said today's big attempts at further automation. > We have plenty of kiosks, self-checkout, automated fulfillment and logistics, etc happening. W

I should have said today's big attempts at further automation. > We have plenty of kiosks, self-checkout, automated fulfillment and logistics, etc happening. We also have plenty of higher skilled jobs having portions automated. Productivity is way up in the last 50 years, and that's through automation and mechanization. We have indeed accumulated tons of this stuff over that time, and that's good! But the more labor id frees up, the less incentive it is to continue down that route. Like, why buy another kiosk, if there is a gazillion people clamoring to be your cashier? The only way to keep constant the financial incentive for further automation is to keep labor markets tight, which we either do by bumping up demand, or reducing labor supply. My point is a lot of people talking about a "jobs apocalypse" seem to assume the technology will just happen no matter what, but that's not true. Stuff gets stuck in the research phase if it's not profitable to develop. The supply of "potential automation" doesn't create it's own demand for actually deployed automation and this is even worse, because the resulting stagnation obscures the root problem.