[lukemunn]

Yes, the promises of full automation have been around for at least a century, where we can go back to texts in the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc and see these claims of technical systems taking over work. In a lot of that rhetoric, the only problem is what happens to the superfluous human when that core block of identity - work - is removed. Of course, those promises have not materialized. There are many issues here in attempting to automate that huge constellation of tasks, gestures, roles, etc under the umbrella of 'work'. One growing area of work, as a quick example, is personal services - child care, elderly care, etc. This work is highly context sensitive, and often requires relational and affective labor, rather than repetitive, standardized, physical gestures. Many kinds of labor are non-trivial from a technical perspective.