This is where you run into flawed premises. A very hefty chunk of automation, in fact, does not make it either cheaper or easier to live. Particularly now that many firms are reaching the limits of actual innovation, and are turning to transaction facilitation and fee extraction as their primary profit taking mechanism.
When the innovators are innovating on being middle-men where previously no middle-men could exist, you've got issues.
Example:
Electronic bill payment service. In order to avoid the hassle of a stamp, envelope, and check, pay $2 on top of your bill to do it from a convenience store.
Not only are you paying more over and above your bill, you get a false gain of value. You just go to the store right? But what if the service goes under? What if servers go down? So on, and so forth.
Arguably, a great deal of automation that exists today strikes me as a regression from 40 years ago. Fewer people actually have a clue now about how value flows through the system, yet resources centralize far more easily than ever before.
McDees freeing up labor makes available elsewhere.
We are not currently funding our labor needs and are seeing decaying infrastructure, just as one example out of many.
One other question we should be asking is why labor is getting more expensive when the promise of tech advancement and automation was to make it cheaper to live.
Cost and risk exposure continues to rise.
Current automation does not appear to be helping.