Every time a job gets cut but productivity remains constant, more wealth funnels upwards. When you can cut hundreds or thousands of jobs due to automation, the process accelerates.

It becomes increasingly more difficult for the displaced workers to find relevant work anymore. They won't make as much, they might have to start over. Sometimes late in life, when it's very hard to start anew.

We might scoff at those workers. They were obviously doing jobs that didn't even need to be done! Or weren't worth as much as they were being paid, obviously because otherwise it wouldn't be so easy to automate!

At the end of the day, does it really matter? There is a real human cost to automation. I'm not saying we don't do it, I'm saying we need a solution to the wealth problem.

Previously part of the solution was that people could afford relatively comfortable lives on comfy office jobs that were essentially meaningless.

Now to get that same level of comfort you have to really demonstrate value. If your job is just comfy and meaningless prepare to get cut. And it's not like there's no money to employ those people for no reason, it's just people above them want to funnel that (wasted, in their minds) capital upwards into their pockets.