I think the people that presume their intelligence will inform how automation plays out will be sorely disappointed when the future is nothing like they expected. To be honest, I don’t want to make any predictions about automation but I’m highly skeptical of the pessimism that dominates the discussion and fatalism around things like UBI.
There isn't much to "expect", large scale automation is happening for more than 50 years now.
It's similar to people saying "AI will revolutionise the world", it already is revolutionising for several decades. It seems to me that this notion became popular in the last few years and has been so simplified/vulgarised that people expect half the world to lose their job at once when "robots" and "ai" take over.
Job automation isn't a single point in time, it's a gradual process that's been happening for as long as work existed. And as long as we run our current economic system there will be jobs to replace automated ones. Currently it seems like services are the new factory jobs (uber, food delivery, &c.).
> Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The techno- logical developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.
Service and retail workers will have to unionize before they have the pay and benefits that made manufacturing such good work. That's how factory workers did it. Service and retail work are approaching the living hell of the pre-union Industrial Age.
