Automation is great. I do it all the time. Sure I could spend my life manually configuring switch ports, copying and pasting information into 50 pointless repositories, but that would be tedious, so I automate it.

Same in a shop. It's far better for a machine to stack a shelf than for a person to do it, it leaves the person free to do something more useful with their life.

> it leaves the person free to do something more useful with their life.

And in this hypothetical, you'd be in favor of paying that person now, right? Surely the machine doesn't need the money in exchange for the value of its labor.

Thus it lowers the cost of providing service thus lowers the price to the customer.

So, I think what you're implying is that lower costs are good for everyone, right?

Yup. Lower costs are a reflection of less human effort going into getting the same result. That's a great move.

In an ideal world all work would be done by automation, and everyone else would be free to do what they wanted for fun.