I agree the automation is happening, but I'm not seeing the part where it leads to better lives for the majority of people.
I have far more time with my kids than my parents ever had with us, partly because I simply do not grocery shop or merchandise shop anymore. Yes there’s still plenty of humans involved but both are heavily automated with AMRs.
This is hours a week of freed time.
Again, to each their own. But for me it’s huge and I love and cherish it.
But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.
I guess countries are becoming more of what they already were: the US gets more unequal and exploitative. Other, more socialist countries are getting more so. China is getting totalitarian using automated facial recognition and censorship.
The Ubers and doordashes and deliveroos of this world are predicated upon the growth of the precariat.
India had all this stuff 50 years ago, just without an app. I remember it not being unusual to have Starbucks delivered to your door in Buenos Aires in 2012. Again, no app.
When you sent a document to the printer, an employee called a "peon" would pick it up and bring it to your office. He would also bring around tea and cookies in the afternoon. Now that's service!
IIRC, the breakdown was typically around 1% lords and priests, 9+% soldiers to protect the lords and priests against other lords and priests, and 90% unfree agricultural labor of one form or another (being a serf was slightly better than being a slave, but only a bit).
No matter how good automation gets, the government is going to lag way behind. I don’t foresee a transition to any sort of utopian era where everyone enjoys the fruits of automation. I think those at the top will continue to hoard the wealth because they own those systems.
A UBI for instance could help with that. But there's nothing but FUD on that subject.