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@chrisingrassia of course i am being a little provocative in saying this, but its nonetheless true, and this is the real threat that westerners perceive from china... both the global capitalists who understand that they are competing with chinese capital now which is not constrained by things like human rights (nor the will of the people in its own country) and normal people who see a future in which they will less and less be able to set the basic coordinates of their own lives in the face of the global machine... in china and vietnam and south korea and...

maybe, but considering what absolutely brutal and ruthless capitalists the chinese are becoming i doubt that this ever happens... because above all capitalism demands efficiency... if an automatic process can be better and produce more efficiently (creating surplus) why waste human resources that could be used someplace else more efficiently where automation cant yet be used?

you ask a good question- as i said above, the cotton gin actually increased the need for slave labor in the american south... cotton was so labor intensive as to be barely profitable... the cotton gin changed that and lead to an explosion in the ag industry at the time... so the cotton pickers just became gin operators... so in this example, an inefficient job was replaced by a more efficient job, but was that job "better?"...did the cotton gin improve the lives of the slaves operating them and the other slaves in the cotton industry?.. it certainly brought wealth...

@SBRDUDE1 the cotton gin actually dramatically increased cotton output so much that it increased the need for slave labor as the number of workers needed exploded... its the opposite of what you are trying to convey, but you are nonetheless not wrong about the effect of automation on many industries....