Well, no. The goal is to maximise profit. One way to do that is to minimise labour costs. But at the extreme, if there are then no consumers who can buy your goods there is no profit...
No, it isn't. Profit is meaningless, money is inherently worthless.
Capitalism exists to encourage the production of (new) goods and services. The system is set up to encourage people to take their capital and invest it for this purpose.
Investments help business ideas that would otherwise never have been made, because the person with the idea couldn't afford it. In return the investor gets a slice of the potential future profits. But the goal of the system is the products the company creates.
Money is worthless. It only carries value based on what you can trade that money for. If I have $10, but a cup of coffee costs $1000, then my $10 are meaningless. But if a house cost $1 then my $10 is very valuable. And what you can trade your money for are the goods that are produced by the economic system.
You are talking past each other; You're discussing very different things - capitalism's terminal utility to humanity versus capitalism's direct operational mechanisms - without actually disagreeing substantively.
The goal of the investor isn't to provide goods & services, it's to get profits in whatever way is possible. He doesn't give a shit about goods and services. This tends to diverge from the interests of non-investors.
We have an investor class that is presently largely in control of our government and our society, whose interests as a part of the capitalist system are currently at a few percent remove from our interests as people who enjoy goods & services. That divergence, as well as the accumulated privilege opposed to our interests that this class derives from control of our government and our society, appears to grow over time with uninterrupted peacetime improvements in automation, and AI is promising almost unimaginably large improvements over the next decade.
The status quo socially liberal, economically neoliberal society is not sustainable even as a polite fiction in the face of that kind of shift.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
As we no longer weep for serfdom-slavery, you don't have to weep for wage-slavery, but you do have to replace it with something else more functional if our society is not to completely collapse. And it's looking like we will be empowering our de facto leaders with all the blood and treasure in the world to stop us from replacing it with anything more functional. Every civil war in the world up to this point has relied upon human soldiers with their own interests and allegiances, faced with a brutal choice of risking their lives to kill their countrymen - people who have the option of not pulling the trigger. This is not going to be the case for much longer.
And that's all assuming we don't get paperclipped, assuming that Ayn Rand is the penultimate cosmic horror and there is nothing darker in the possibility space, no pressure on the right side of the Drake Equation. I don't know about that.
The more salient term isn't "capitalism", but rather "capitalization".
Most investment is done by converting anticipated future value (modulo some degree of risk), and encapsulating it into an asset price, which is relative to the opportunity cost of alternative investments, and the current discount rate.
And capitalization doesn't have a goal beyond honoring those future returns (or "embedded growth obligations"). It doesn't care whether those returns come from innovation, production, rent-seeking, or even a "greater sucker" Ponzi scheme. Investors (and their financial agents) operate almost entirely on Make Number Go Up ("buy low sell high"), and any incentives that result in win-win increases to human flourishing are entirely secondary effects.
the purpose of an economy is to support and ensure the existence of its host organism, its country. there is no rule that says any specific amount of human labour has to be involved.
