> You seem to think raising productivity is a bad thing?
Higher productivity means very little to people whose labor plummets in value over the course of a couple of years. One day they won't be needed anymore, maybe that's good for you.
Ever since at least the industrial revolution we had this same song and dance play out again and again. Yet, unemployment rates around the world are the world are fairly steady (and vary mostly in line with how business-friendly local regulations and taxes are, and so far not much with the current state of technology).
I'm a software developer by trade. I welcome the coming brave new world in which machines can do all the software.
With that argument we'd all be unemployed ever since agriculture (which 90% of the populace was working in a few hundred years ago) was invaded by machines. Turns out, people get other stuff to do and are as overworked as ever.
People often bring up something like "oh, someone will need to maintain the robots that just took your job." But that's seldom where the new jobs are, at least not en masse: the whole point of automation is to use less labour on the task in aggregate afterwards.
Baristas making overpriced fancy coffee is something the western world started to want to afford in the 1990s and 2000s, because we were getting rich enough thanks to lots of automation and technological progress in other areas. Coffee-making itself hadn't see much progress.
The new jobs can be anywhere in the economy, it doesn't have anything to do with the jobs that got automated or replaced.
Higher productivity means very little to people whose labor plummets in value over the course of a couple of years. One day they won't be needed anymore, maybe that's good for you.