"most people can end up miserably poor" == "ever-increasing inequality"
Which begs the question - is the misery of poverty due to the lack of access to important goods or services, or because of the relative wealth standing?
Poor people don't care that they will never own a Ferrari (or even a car newer than 15 years old, ever). They care about the basics, food, water, shelter.
Once we don't have people in developed (and undeveloped) countries living without adequate food or being one bad week or accident away from homelessness we can come back to see if they are just simply jealous.
Philosophically, why is inequality an inherently bad thing? If the poorest among us universally had the standard of living of today’s millionaires, why should we be bothered by the existence of trillionaires or quadrillionaires?
For me, it comes to a differential in political power. The greater the magnitude of inequality, the easier it is for the quadrillionaires to put the plebeian millionaires back into abject poverty.
As you said, it's because money begets control of other people's lives. If the only thing you could do with money is live in luxury, then hardly anyone would care about it but wealth can be used to:
1. Ensure your plans never fail because you continually inject money into the equation. And by that ensure that other peoples plans always fail because they run out of money first. 2. Stymie actions and actors that you dislike. (and revenge on your enemies) 3. Materially, improve the lives of your children.
Automation funnels that money away from people in poverty to property owners.
There is no support today, nor is any on the horizon, for people poised to be displaced by automation (in the US).
Combine all of these, and you're going to end up with a class of people with an inability to meet their basic needs, and with no support from the government. This historically doesn't end well.
And let's just say we lived in a unified society somehow. The net suffering of all peoples could only be alleviated by progressing technology forward and proper social policy. Removing one doesn't help solve the problem.
The problem is going to hit us all in the face soon, no matter how much we shout "but social policies will fix it" from the rooftops.
Also, if you dig beyond the basic rates (for example, into the "not in the labor force, but want to be"), you will see that it's around 6M, whereas the 20 year low is closer to 4M.
I'm not advocating for removing automation. I'm warning that rolling out the automation of even more jobs is going to cause societal problems. Perhaps I'm hoping the right person will read this and start doing something about it, since I'm not that person.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
But that's not happening right now (see earlier comments about social legislation), and it won't in anything resembling "in time" to prevent more people from losing their jobs with no reasonable replacements (i.e. above-poverty line wages) in sight.
It's easy to think that our actions have no consequences, or more accurately that "someone else" will take care of the consequences of the actions we take. And the more we say it to ourselves, the more we believe it.
- Why is the amount of automation we have good, and more is bad? That's an "I've got mine" approach. You're essentially saying that you're happy with your gadgets (dishwasher et al) and with the current price level and variety of consumer goods and no further improvement is needed.
- Who decides where the line between enough and too much is? A rich Westerner? Or an African without lights, running water, or a washing machine, who works by manually recycling garbage?
- How did we deal with the massive changes automation has already made to society? We're vastly better off now, why shouldn't we continue?
People have been asserting that machines imply post scarcity since the communist manifesto in 1848. I am not convinced.
-- Stephen Hawking, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...