The irony looms large. Most of us have worked on projects that replaced people. I remember one from 2005; automating returns at an online retail company. The returns department was 15 people. We did a project that removed steps and automated others. Ten people were let go.

More so was agile having developers replace the heavy old product and project management organizations a lot of enterprises had. And then came devops were developers replaced sys admins? Remember those folks?

The billionaire class tell us the utopia is coming. Why should we believe them? Given that they’ve failed to share the benefits of the massive productivity gains of the last 50 years (stagnant pay, 30 hour work weeks, health care and social safety net?) why should we trust them to share this? They didn’t when we automated away other people’s jobs why would they now that ours are being automated? We shouldn’t believe them imo.