Ya I agree in theory but disagree in practice. I moved furniture for 2.5 years and delivered appliances for 6 months for a warehouse from about 2001-2003 while I was trying to get my shareware business going. This meant sometimes loading and unloading full 53 foot semi trailers of furniture and boxes (typically 2 or 3 households worth) with just 2 or 3 people, up to 2 or 3 times a day if we were working in the warehouse itself and had a few stragglers who could help.

For a while there I came up with roughly one invention per day that would radically reduce the amount of labor we performed or protect us from the sun and elements. For example, in big cities they use lifts to windows and chutes on stairs to get boxes up and down tall buildings. But they don't use anything in smaller cities except elbow grease usually.

Anyway, whenever I brought up a new idea, it was soundly rejected by pretty much everyone. The standard answer being "that would put us out of a job!"

There is massive resistance to any kind of innovation in the shipping industry. My gut feeling is that it won't change at all until it's too late, and then the whole thing will come crashing down when it's replaced by self-driving forklifts and drones. It's one of the few industries that still (under)employs millions of people, and I think that we should keep that in mind before we work so hard to automate it into oblivion.

But automation is inevitable and will come within 10 years or so, so if we really want to help society, we should be focussing on education and vo-tech training in order to find meaningful work for everyone who's going to be misplaced. I know in my heart that that won't be enough though, which is why I'm a huge proponent of universal basic income.