> Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to?
The most successful model in history is the "capital class" creating new middle class jobs by venturing their capital.
That’s literally the opposite of what happened historically.
Read up on the history of textiles for example and cottage industry created and then was supplanted by a capital class. Economies of scale require all sorts of things to get going like efficient transportation, but after a tipping point wealth centralizes not the reverse. Slowly clothing goes from something like 1/3 of all labor to a small fraction of our current economy.
It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue subsistence farming, but they choose not to.) People materially got richer, as they moved up from subsistence farming. I think I spend a few hours a year to get the money to buy clothes, which I think is a good deal. (I spend longer looking for clothes I want, which I hate doing, but is quite the luxury historically.)
Many women did this as their full time job. Spinsters became a viable option for women without a family or land to be self sufficient. Most women used to multi task a drop spindle as they went about their day. A spinning wheel was a massive improvement per hour but the lack of portability made it an independent job. As specialists could now make way more thread which enabled the transport of large quantities of relatively high value goods to one location for economies of scale. Which could then benefit from a positive feedback loop.
> manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing
Anyway, my point was factories came late in the process. Automation of thread making occurred at several stages before there was enough supply excess supply for any kind of scale. Without that factories could only really automate less than 5% of the total labor for making clothing.
So sure, eventually automation came for those home spinners, but that happened after the natural benefits from economies of scale alongside huge shifts in the land devoted to cotton etc. This ties into all kinds of economic activity, southern plantations depended on a relative increase in the value and demand of cotton far above its historic level etc.
> Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?
It seems to do a bit of both. People do slightly more work with lots more automation to help them, and automation generates work as well (e.g. once upon a time you'd occasionally send a memo out; now anyone can email anyone else and it all needs archiving).
The most successful model in history is the "capital class" creating new middle class jobs by venturing their capital.