Regardless of policy, wouldn't automation inherently lead to agglomeration of capital?
If police have advanced surveillance technology and drones, even violent protest becomes very hard.
What pressure is there to cater to people who are powerless dead weight on the economy?
I know some people who are investing based on the expectation of this being the future.
Voting happens because economic power implies political power. People must be kept satisfied for things to keep running.
If that deal gets upended, I don't think the economic dead weight will be treated well.
We've been reshaping the system to redistribute trillions to capital owners via government IOUs that will eventually come due. Inevitably, this will be "solved" by cutting benefits to workers while insisting no other solution could possibly exist.
Like, you know, undoing these relatively recent handouts to the ultra rich and restructuring policy to the benefit of workers.
Umm, no you can't. Otherwise We would have done this already. In a world where the rich would be even richer, this would be even more impossible.
So the unfairness happens entirely during the transition. The fact that the unfair advantage can be retained over time has nothing to do with automation though.
for example, government ownership of automation would increase the government's spending power
On one side it's interesting, because it means that if you buy a machine, next years you can buy more, and more and more things get automated.
The bad side, is that we doesn't have a way for labor to reap the benefits of it as well, except from lower purchasing costs... which is counter-balanced by the need of the system to push for more and more consumption every year, to keep it working. (E.g price of electronics/performance decreasing, but need every few years to buy new phones with more performance to keep up with the more and more hungry apps)