That's you moving up the class-ladder, not the results of automation. As you said, humans are the cornerstone of that resource chain you're describing, for most part.

Actually I moved down the class ladder. I make a fraction what my parents did. The home I grew up in is worth millions now. I could never afford it.

But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.

It is just fundamentally strange that you are including gig economy work in a discussion of automation. That isn't automation! The people shopping for you are not automatons just because your interaction with them is mediated by an app! They are doing your chores for you and have less time with their families so you can have more time with yours.

It’s heavily automated where I shop. I know because I write software for the robots at some of these customers and 3PLs. I watch the robots do their thing on a big board.

Right, the human+machine system is providing the scalable and convenient service, but the "human" part is usually some minimum-wage or gig worker. This kind of automation is helping the haves, but not so much the have-nots.

I guess countries are becoming more of what they already were: the US gets more unequal and exploitative. Other, more socialist countries are getting more so. China is getting totalitarian using automated facial recognition and censorship.

>But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.

The Ubers and doordashes and deliveroos of this world are predicated upon the growth of the precariat.

India had all this stuff 50 years ago, just without an app. I remember it not being unusual to have Starbucks delivered to your door in Buenos Aires in 2012. Again, no app.

True story from the early oughts: a friend spent some weeks at the India office of his big US-based software company.

When you sent a document to the printer, an employee called a "peon" would pick it up and bring it to your office. He would also bring around tea and cookies in the afternoon. Now that's service!

I mean, I just take my kids with me shopping. Usually alone. They're twins and they're 3. These things aren't hard, people just don't want to do them.