The people paying for these sorts of developments are the people who do that planning and strategy, and people are terrible at automating their own jobs. People presume tasks which they find simple will be easier to automate than tasks they find complex, and imagine a small number of skilled operators having their capabilities multiplied by systems that take care of the tedious labor. They see the ditch diggers being replaced by robots which the foreman can command. But the human brain is fantastic at estimating the size of a rock half buried in the ground, and terrible at keeping track of hundreds of workers' schedules.

It's difficult to admit that what tends to make you a smart and valuable human is your ability to behave more like a computer. It's even more difficult to admit that the parts of your job you consider the most fulfilling and impressive can often be rendered unnecessary with minor process changes or ought to be done by someone else whose skills are more appropriate for those tasks.