Check out Robin Hanson's Twitter. His hobby horse recently has been finding _any_ evidence that total employment is affected by recent automation and he's not really finding any.
Technological progress in production, like automation, reduces the proportional costs of labor, thereby accelerating inequity.
Because surplus (profit), not siphoned by management, goes to the investors (providers of capital).
This has always been true.
Some notable exceptions are profit sharing arrangements, like early Walmart, Microsoft, etc.
(Edit: Toyota too. They explicitly reward Labor for productivity improvements. I don't know if that's still true, generally. More recently, Haier has their own unique strategy for innovation and empowering labor. I'm super keen to learn more about them. I have no idea if they share the surplus more fairly. Of course, co-ops explicitly share the surplus; can't believe I forgot about them.)
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Seems to me that everyone, everyone, is determined to not see the pink elephant sitting in the living room.
Paul Krugman is maybe closest, with his theory that "job stealing robots" is a convenient cover story for decline of Labor.
Like how Big Timber deflected blame for job losses onto the spotted owl away from automation.
When in SE Asia, it's common to see 20 staff in a store the size of a 7-11, while here it's one or two. (Note that most are unpaid interns, but then I'm the only customer.)
So the US has already minimized the number of unskilled staff relative to some other countries.
Ironically, tech companies often have a shadow engineering organization of 10 or more customer service engineers per company sitting around waiting for an email to help onboard a new client.
