Automation doesn't replace jobs

From Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Maintenance Art

A general definition of automation is the replacement of human labour with non-human effort.

Note that the word “job” is not part of this definition. A job is a combination of various related tasks. Automatic systems are very narrowly focused on specific tasks. They do one thing really well, but can’t really do anything else. Even with deep learning we struggle to teach individual neural networks more than a couple of closely related tasks.

So automation is not the replacement of human jobs, rather as economist Daron Acemoglu says: “Automation is the replacement of tasks previously performed by labor”.

From The End of Human Doctors – Understanding Automation - Luke Oakden-Rayner