Well you know Marx said it was inevitable so maybe we're hitting on a contradiction in capitalism that is too big to handle - the desire of individual firms to automate away their labor on a micro scale has the macro scale effect of eliminating all your consumers. It's not even good for business within a capitalist system.
Possibly because he was so catastrophically wrong about the form of the society that would inevitably follow from state socialism?
In a sense he was partly right i.e. almost all state socialist societies transformed in a very similar way. It was just that they transformed into totalitarian dictatorships rather than stateless utopia.
The following is just my opinion: Marx certainly used logic to reach his conclusions about the sunset of capitalism in advanced societies, and the dawn of a communal society in which abundant resources remove incentive for competition. He was very explicit about this being a "natural" progression, far removed from the ideological regimes past-and-present which impose the system by force.
My problem with Marx isn't the conclusions he draws, it's more about the factors which he excludes that lead him to those very conclusions. That's another way of saying that it's not his answers that I have a problem with (like I said, he's being logical), it's a matter of the question itself being fundamentally flawed.
My interpretation is that he did not fully account for the nature of humankind: the will to power; the drive to improve your position in life; the need to nurture and manifest one's unique abilities in this world, which leads to massive satisfaction (and a nice dopamine hit!).
I think that those properties exist within us all, to a degree, and can lead us towards doing good and bad, depending on how they are integrated into our personality and value-systems. One employee might earn a well-deserved promotion after toiling hard for his boss and colleagues, and enjoy the swell of pride in his work and himself. Another may scheme and politick his way to the same promotion, feeling a similar sense of satisfaction that could be described as the "ugly twin" of the other aforementioned employee.
The question I ask myself is this: which of the two hypothetical persons mentioned above does a centrally-planned communist system facilitate and reward, in a society without massive abundance of resources? The first employee's innovation and superior work, his "ability", would have no effect on his "need", so there is no justification for rewarding him, and his family, monetarily under the value system. The second person would have more options to improve their station, wether by artificially increasing their perceived "need", or climbing the power-structure of a government which has exclusive control over distribution. In fact, I believe the system itself would force the former to behave like the latter out of sheer necessity, or risk perishing.
Assuming that everything menial can be automated, we're left with very few "real jobs". So where do the non-creative non-entrepreneurial types land?
Do they live in some dystopian future where they have to dig holes for the sake of "having a job" then filling them back in again? Or do you argue for "mincome"?
Yes, and also -- where do the really creative types land? Do we get rid of art? (we are doing a great job at that these days) If our public education systems serve mainly to train "workers" or increasingly "soldiers", we aren't educating toward the future. we have been educating (in public school) toward the past for a long time. That means we favor what had been practical in the (increasingly distant) past and devalue ( really have zero idea or vision concerning) what skills will be useful in the future. It turns out that it doesn't make sense to train kids and people to behave more like robots when we are building an army of much better, tireless robots. Our public education systems in the US avoid intellectualism, creativity, and the arts (shaping the arts for the future isn't an option- we just cut them from the curriculum).
Here is an analogy. Do you pay for the air that you breath? No. It is free, because air is so abundant, so avaliable, that nobody would possibly charge for it.
Imagine if the qualities that apply to air, apply to other things. As they are already doing so. There are tons of free software, for example.
Now, imagine that food and housing became so abundant, so available for anyone to take as much as they want, that nobody would even think to charge for it.
Such a society is still capitalist. It is just full of abundance.
Not arguing for anything, was just noting that those arguments are not new, being central to Marx's theory.
Yes, we speak of robots and AI now and the rate at which jobs are destroyed has certainly surpassed the rate at which new jobs get created, but the means of production being in the hands of the few (the bourgeoisie), along with automation, these have been happening ever since the dawn of the industrial age and is what animated Karl Marx.
Read "The Communist Manifesto", it will ring a bell.
But all this has given us communism, with disastrous results. And yeah, there are always people arguing that communism wasn't "implemented right", which is what you get with any rotten theories.
So what I'm proposing is:
(1) awareness that these arguments are essentially Marxism and
(2) be prepared to defend them by coming up with a theory for why it could work this time.
Good or bad, it's an instant red flag.