Productivity increases due to automation go to the owners of capital. Many individual’s productivity is not going up, therefore they are worth less.

That’s actually not true. The Baumol cost disease means that people who are not actually more productive in their current roles (eg orchestral clarinetists) still make more money because of productivity growth elsewhere. You couldn’t possibly pay an orchestral clarinetist as much today as you did in 1800 because they’d just quit and do literally anything else for a living. You have to pay them more.

On a scale from 1800 to now, we are all better off. But if you look at the past 20 years in the us, we are clearly not benefiting all of society. Arguing that the avg clarinetist is slightly better off today compared to 1970 doesn't account for the fact that many many other people haven't had an increase, but they've had a decrease in their standard of living.

I find this claim rather incredible, if only because of the set of things that hadn’t even been invented in 1970, which nonetheless everybody seems to have today.

> Productivity increases due to automation go to the owners of capital.

That is only true if there is a monopoly on automation, which there generally isn't. In which case the productivity increases go into lower prices, which result in greater demand for whatever is still scarce.

That can be capital owners (e.g. land), but it can also be skilled labor or literally anything else which is in demand and people choose to spend the money on that they had saved from the lower prices driven by automation.

Whatever the reasoning, data shows wealth and income gaps increasing, and the ones with capital are the on the winning side.

That has nothing to do with automation and everything to do with low interest rates. When interest rates are low, people borrow more money and bid up the prices of capital assets.

One important insight of mainstream economics is the idea of "economies of scale" and "specialization," both of which improve productivity and both of which rely in part on a larger population or increased trade. Once you've globalized trade, you're limited by population.

This is especially true for things somewhere between niche and commodity: it's not worth automating something if you're not producing enough of them to justify the capital cost of the automation equipment. It's not worth reusing your rockets if you're only launching like 3 satellites per year (still have to keep the factory open and practiced). This is why Moore's Law has slowed: tech has tapped basically the entire world's population (more than 5 billion people have mobile devices now); there aren't vast new groups of consumers to sell to any more, so the investment in the next step is not worth it like it was before.

In short, more humans actually increases the per-person productivity.

In some cases it may indeed be worth automating even when producing at low volumes:

* data mining or AI can analyze data sets better than all the humans you could possibly muster, data sets that can illuminate low volume but high impact decision making (new product need, safety critical alerts, incoming asteroids) * robot surgical devices can perform more consistently (possibly higher efficacy) which is highly valuable even for low volume surgeries * automated cars will be demonstrably safer even if overall demand for transportation declines * demand for more specialized and lifelong education will increase even if the number of students decreases (career changes, working retirements, self-improvement, etc) * automated solutions to climate change remediation (carbon sequestration, planting trees, etc) will likely scale well beyond manual labor options in an aging shrinking population and will be needed generations after the damage levels off * space exploration requires automation even for just a single mission, and even a smaller population will likely continue to explore the solar system

I think imagination and adaptation will manage ok. In fact I would rather see capital deployed to less consumption by volume and more high value consumption. Would you rather eat a farm-to-table organic microgreens salad for dinner, or a bag of Wonder Bread?