This is how we got to the modern world. In the middle ages there were vast tracts of theoretically arable land that simply were never developed, and even land

This is how we got to the modern world. In the middle ages there were vast tracts of theoretically arable land that simply were never developed, and even land that was being farmed saw very little investment, and thus for centuries there were low wages for common folk and food shortages were common. It wasn't that people lacked the means to make improvements, just that those with sources of capital could quite literally live as kings without needing to invest in those improvements. Then the black death came and the population suddenly plummeted. In many cases there was no one to work the fields, and those that did remain demanded much higher wages. Now that labor actually cost something, it made sense to try to get more out of that labor, so actual investment was made in making the land more productive. In a generation european farmers saw dramatic increases in food production, for the first time since antiquity consistently well above subsistence levels. This allowed a greater proportion of the population to get out from food production and do much more valuable work. This moment kicks off the period of economic growth which continued to today and enabled our modern world. Similarly, wherever we see comparable slave and free societies, the cultures that need to pay for their labor see dramatically more innovation and general progress than the cultures built around slavery. It is amazing how much a handful of elites satisfied with the status quo can squander human labor. Worse still, great effort is made to propagate poverty or caste systems to ensure an adequate labor pool for jobs that are both undesirable and unnecessary. There is an age old myth that eliminating a job means eliminating the place in society for the people currently doing that job. Automation will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The wealthy push this narrative because cheap labor makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. When the fields were mechanized, the people who had known only farming learned new skills and prospered. When the factories were mechaized, the laborers learned new skills and prospered. Our brains evolved for picking fruit and hunting mammoths; "low-skill" tasks like working a register in retail are exactly as learned as "high-skill" tasks. Every human is capable of outperforming the greatest super computers at many tasks, and thus automatable tasks should be done by computers to free up more people to do the non-automatable, higher value-add tasks.