> Yes, automation creates better global productivity, but it also creates concentrated harms that are almost never redressed.
That's true for people who aren't capable of automating things. They're left with skills that are more efficiently performed by machines, and so their prospects are poor if they don't have other skills.
But you raised the case of someone capable of automating their job, who refuses to do so because of the fear of losing their job. That's a very different situation, because someone capable of automating their job has exactly the kind of skills that are currently in high demand, and can't easily be automated, if at all. Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?
> Either you automate and get fucked
The idea that "if I automate my job, I'll get fired" is a simplistic scenario, that hardly ever plays out like that. The people who get fired are much more likely to be the ones who aren't amenable to automation, who just want to keep doing things the same old way. Those people tend to be worse than useless to a business trying to automate, because they obstruct instead of helping.
> or someone else does and you get fucked anyway.
In my experience, the ones that "get fucked" are those who are either not capable or not willing to get involved in automation. I've worked on the other side of this equation for most of my career: I automate stuff. That's what software developers do. I also talk to management about how best to use the people whose jobs are affected. In these situations, the people who are most open to change, and willing to help effect it, are the most useful, and the least likely to lose their jobs.
Besides, someone capable of automating their job probably shouldn't be in that rote job in the first place, and what you call "getting fucked" is more like a hint from life that they should be doing something more economically valuable.
Luckily, someone like that has that more valuable work right in front of them. Being able to automate things is a skill that not everyone has, and that's very valuable to employers. That's the entire reason that good software developers get paid as much as they do. Actually getting demonstrable experience in automating job functions is much more valuable than taking a course and trying to switch into that kind of role without experience at it.
Helping with automation puts you in a strong position - you're proving that you can help improve the efficiency of the business. Automation produces new opportunities to be more productive - e.g. producing more, or handling more customers, without increasing staff to match. Work is not so much eliminated, as changed. Again, the people who lose in this process are the people who resist change. The people involved in automation are well-positioned to understand the change and spot new opportunities, and again, this is valuable to the business.
> Either way you have to try and find a different job, which isn't free, costless, or painless.
Having to find a new job is not a foregone conclusion by any means, for the kinds of reasons I've described, as well as because total automation of a job typically isn't achieved quickly.
But even if you do end up losing your job, you now have skills that are multiple times more valuable than what you were originally doing before automation.
In any case, you really shouldn't think of having to switch jobs as "getting fucked." The general advice these days is to switch jobs every few years, if you want to maximize your salary, because companies don't tend to give raises that match the industry rate, particularly in tech jobs.
If you're in a rote job that's amenable to automation, you should be looking for ways to improve that situation anyway. Even if your current job is safe for a while, if other jobs like yours are being automated, salaries for those jobs are going to start dropping. You'd be in a sinking ship and not doing anything about it.
I'm reminded of a quote from "Ghost in the Shell": "Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."