It's an in-between step. Already they're reducing costs by making work simpler, reducing the workforce, etc. One person can operate a dozen delivery robots, vs a dozen delivery people doing the same work. It's the common trend in automation and industrialization.

Which also happens to provide training data ever time a human has to intervene...

They just realized it’s not that much more expensive to give these jobs to foreign workers instead.

If you give driving jobs to a series of remote workers you'll end up creating a lot of new jobs. EMTs, doctors, ambulance truck assembly, etc.

which is worse over time - developing automation to take over certain jobs or staffing certain jobs with offshore contractors?

That depends on where you want the money going: everybody involved in developing and maintaining automated systems at home and abroad (high-skilled labor) or everybody involved in controlling drones from afar (low-skilled labor). Of course, the amount going to either group will be drastically different depending on a multitude of factors.

Less jobs will be available as fewer workers are required if one human can do multiple tasks remotely.

When ATMs began rolling out, more branches opening increaesed the demand for bank tellers. This may happen here as well. http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...

Yes, when they began rolling out.

If you look at the first chart in that article, bank teller employment peaked at a bit over 600,000. If you follow the link to the BLS projections given near the end of the article[1], you'll see that bank teller jobs in 2018 are down to 472,000 and expected to decline by another 58,000 over the next decade. Bank teller jobs per capita is declining more rapidly, since population is still growing.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/te...

Current state of AI is pattern recognition, kind of augmenting humans rather than replacing humans.

In order to render millions of people jobless, we have to achieve Artificial General Intelligence.

Yes and that's a tall order considering even we humans do not even have general intelligence. Our minds are just a federation of special intelligences.

we have identified what could be automated but we haven’t taken any real steps to implement it. there is a lot of resistance when it comes to automation in the workplace.