Is it ethical to automate business?

'Economics in One Lesson' refutes this logic in its chapter "The Curse of Machinery" (http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap07p1.html). Some highlights:

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If we assert automation removes the need for labour. Then it follows that to maximize labour, we must make our jobs as inefficient as possible.

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Not only should we regard all future improvements as calamitys, but we must also regard all past technology with equal horror.

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Why should freight be carried from Chicago to New York by railroad when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?

I assert that, in principle, any labor performed by humans may be replaced by equivalent labor performed by machines, and that as technology advances, the fraction which may be cost-effectively replaced will increase, most likely going to 1 shortly after the invention of strong AI.

I also assert that the total amount of labor which a finite population can productively make use of at once is finite.

It follows that if technology continues to advance, there will reach a point at which less human labor is can be productively made use of than is available.

Under a capitalist system, people who don't own the means of production must exchange their labor for anything they need. Therefor, this set of facts would predict that continued technological advancement within a purely capitalist system would eventually lead to starvation amid plenty once human labor becomes close to valueless. Rather than halting the progress of technological advancement, replacing the capitalism with either collective ownership of the means of production or a sort of vestigial capitalism with massive entitlement programs at or before that point seems like the way to go to me.

Don't mind me, I'm just going out to smash a few looms.

http://www.cottontown.org/page.cfm?language=eng&pageID=5...