However what you haven't addressed is the impact of reducing the human labor cost/skill to producing portraits. Historically painting portraits were prohibitively expensive, likely most people never had a painting/portrait of themselves or their family. The introduction of photography enabled everyone to have photos of themselves, their families, their children growing up, their wedding. In terms of labour, we started doing things with photos that only the richest people could have afforded to do with paint. Just think of how many mall photography shops there used to be in the early 90s. In the long term we wound up with a higher quality of life by making something that used to be expensive accessible, while still maintaining a large number of jobs. Just not if you're a painter.
tl;dr, automation is bad for the individual, but good for society.
We don't see it because we're immersed in it. To that guy, everything we do is gold-plated and incredibly decadent. We are far, far beyond creating and exchanging things simply for survival.
The richest people don't even create or exchange things of any substance. A guy plays basketball, makes ten million a year. Somebody writes a best-selling book, never has to work again for life. These things would have made no sense to the overwhelming majority of people just 150 years ago.
Hell, in France of the 1950s, the majority of homes outside Paris didn't have indoor plumbing.
(Consider, as a corrolary, that a major cause of building failure is moisture-induced rot: if you want to risk-mitigate your construction and reduce a major source of failure, you'll consolidate plumbing either outside the structure, or to a subsection of it which is particularly immune to rot.)
The invention of photography vastly reduced the demand for painters, first by allowing a photographer to produce vast numbers of portraits quickly and cheaply, then by allowing consumers to make their own photographs. People still make paintings for money, but there is a power-law distribution of the rewards - the vast majority are amateurs or barely scrape a living, while a tiny handful of artists sell paintings for tens of millions of dollars.
There is a growing economic consensus that automation will lead to substantial polarization of the labour market. The jobs most threatened by automation are the skilled but routine jobs that characterise most of the middle class. Some of the displaced factory workers, truck drivers and clerical workers might find a good career as an artisanal baker or a professional YouTuber; I suspect that many more will end up falling into poorly paid and precarious work at the bottom of the labour market, or dropping out of the labour market entirely.
Ultimately, we're talking about people's lives and livelihoods. It's simply not good enough to assume that everything will be OK, to hand-wave away serious doubts being raised by sensible and informed people. There is a strong possibility that the wave of populism spreading across the western world is being stoked by increasing economic insecurity resulting from automation. We on HN are the people responsible for automation; it is incumbent on us to seriously examine the risks posed by it. If we are not prepared for these risks, the results could be catastrophic.