While we have automated things, we are nowhere close to that today. A lot of current menial jobs CAN be automated today, but the cost of labor is cheaper than designing and deploying automated solutions.

Having higher cost of labor will incentivize more capital solutions to menial jobs (automation, substitutions), which will change societal patterns a lot (maybe you should expect a machine to take orders at every restaurant) but could certainly lead to a happier 'steady state' long term.

From that moment on it was very clear to me what my value to the company was. Combine that with the long hours, low pay and constant watching over my clock in times made it very easy to just "walk" from that job with no notice.

The worst part was knowing that there were people who had been there 20 years and had (seemingly) no upward mobility during the entire time. After 6mos I was moved up to QA (with an insignificant pay increase) and I realized that I was as high in the company as I was going to get without someone dying.

I have no issue working...but if I am going to be poor while working 56hr weeks...why do it?

"Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"

[1]https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Well that's not the outcome automation is having but quite the opposite. Automation means fewer jobs for some, meaning those left without those jobs have to compete for a brutal job market to make rent when unemployment runs out, it doesn't mean they get to prop their legs on the table and pursue arts and other hobbies.

The automation utopia where everyone is free from most work cannot and will not happen under the current economic model where all the benefits of automation are vacuumed by the private companies developing them and the governments have to deal with those left without a job and support them with taxes taken from those who still have a job.

Now we have 40 hour 5 day weeks as standard - already a utopia compared to before automation started with the first industrial revolution. People are even talking about 32 hours. These tiny work hours buy us a king’s ransom of goods, and probably half of us are either retired or too young to work.

Added to this, we’re seeing the best job market in history.

If you can find the cloud inside this silver lining, your eyesight is to be applauded. Perhaps you had modern eye surgery giving you 20/20 vision.

I think it's likely a universal basic income (small at first --- not a "living wage" yet, but enough to provide everyone with more security and to eliminate some conditional benefits programs, EITC, etc) would be a good thing. But it's really fairly unprecedented, despite efforts at research.

A big question to answer is about paternalism in benefits-- what's the right amount?

We have a big contingent of people angry when other people buy luxury goods or candy with SNAP. We're also worried that if we don't provide housing or food assistance to the poor-- putting strings on the money ensuring it's used for those purposes-- they wouldn't eat. We end up with this wacky system where there's restrictions on the money that are ineffective at preventing abuse but also strikingly effective at preventing poor people from using it to systematically improve their situation. We also incur massive costs for these administrative controls compared to just giving money out, and create benefits "cliffs" where improving your income reduces your net resources.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Fewer workers means fewer goods and services. If demand remains constant or increases, you get inflation. The pandemic caused supply chain issues, but this wouldn't have been as big of an issue had demand been artificially pumped with the stimulus. In many places, such as the ports, productivity is at an all-time high, but they're still bottlenecking consumers.