Those who are smart have their own biases, and shortsightedness. Because you're smart, you tend to dwell in the complex and complicated stuff. And you think you see all the interactions that happen there. But owing to the number of variables around, there are bound to be some unforeseen second or third order effects that you couldn't account for. Things like, building something for a purpose and society deciding it can be used for something else.
Now I don't know if automation will have these types of effects. But I at least am humble enough to recognise that it could, and that the effects could be devastating. And judging by the speed at which the big companies want to get rid of these manual processes, it doesn't seem they think too much about how this would affect the struggling class.