[Cthulhu_]

The lords need some work done, but they're making sure people earn as little as possible, have zero ties, and no transferable skills. I'm thinking of McJobs; zero-hour contracts, contractors, gig economy work, that kinda thing.

[bamboozled]

This is IMO more what I see, we're all working harder, for less, but we're all still working.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's the way of it, because automation makes things cost less, but only the things that get automated. But if things cost less then you can pay people less. So what happens is that all the money goes to the places with artificial scarcity.

We don't have meaningful scarcity anymore, not for the essentials anyway. There is a finite amount of land but not a finite amount of housing units, because you can build arbitrarily many of them on top of each other. We can produce more food than people have any need to eat and producers then spend rather a lot of money convincing them to buy more than that. Medicine is only genuinely scarce to the extent that it's limited by labor availability, which means labor should move there and drive down the price unless something is constraining it.

But if you can make something like housing or medicine artificially scarce, you can suck all the surplus out of everybody's paycheck. And that's the problem.