To me this just reads like how I imagine people and the Luddites thought about automated looms. At first they were excited, thinking about the cheap and abundant cloth they put in plenty of work to make automated looms work flawlessly, until they start getting replaced. But they made excuses that they always need someone who knows more than "put cloth on spool, press button" to run these factories and that skilled people will always be needed. But slowly and surely the factory went towards quantity and not quality, and since quantity was done regardless why pay for the skilled and knowledgeable workers? And soon nobody made good money making cloth except the factory owner, the cloth was shit, and the people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.