It's useful to look back in history: the automation of most of the work in agriculture over the last 10,000 years turned out to be mostly great in hindsight... but it was a lot slower than the pace of change today.
Much of the agricultural automation that occurred in the 19th century was a response to labor shortages as people moved to industrial centers for jobs that were more attractive than farm labor.
There are pamphlets by early industrialists who advocated this as a way of dealing with labor shortages in their factories and the natural idleness of peasants.