Hero of Alexandria (born around 10 AD) is credited with developing the first steam engine, the first vending machine and the first known wind powered machine (a musical organ). Given the revolutionary impact of the steam engine centuries later, it might be wondered why the Greeks did not use these inventions in their economy. While some claim the Greeks did not see the implications, others claim the decision was based on concerns over social stability. The development of steam or wind power on a significant scale would have displaced slave labor. This could have caused social unrest or even contributed to a revolution.
While what prevented the Greeks from developing steam or wind power can still be debated, an anecdote about Roman emperor Vespasian was clear about his opposition to a labor-saving construction device: he stated he must always ensure the workers earned enough money to buy food and this device would put them out of work.
While labor saving technology has advanced dramatically since Hero and Vespasian, the basic questions remain the same. These include the question of whether to adopt the technology and questions about the impact of such technology on specific individuals and society.
Obviously, each labor-saving advancement must (by its nature) eliminate some jobs and create some initial unemployment. For example, when factory robots are introduced to make cars, then human laborers will be displaced from those jobs. Obviously, this initial impact tends to be negative on the displaced workers while generally being positive for the employers.
While Vespasian expressed concerns about the impact of such devices, a commonly held view about more recent advances is that they have had a general positive impact. The usual narrative is that these advances replaced the lower-paying (and often more dangerous or unrewarding) jobs with better jobs while providing more goods at a lower cost. So, while some individuals might suffer at the start, the invisible machine of the market would result in an overall increase in utility for society. Not everyone agrees with this narrative and people tend to fear most what the next innovation might inflict.
The positive narrative can be the foundation for a utilitarian moral argument in favor of labor-saving technology. The gist is that the overall increase in benefits outweighs the harms created. Thus, on utilitarian grounds, the elimination of these jobs by means of technology is morally acceptable. Naturally, each situation can be debated in terms of the benefits and the harms, but the basic moral reasoning seems solid. If the technological advance that eliminates jobs creates more good than harm for a society, then the advance seems morally acceptable.
Obviously, people can disagree about who they regard as counting morally and who they regard as not counting (or not counting as much). Obviously, a person who focuses on the impact on workers will often have a different view than someone most concerned with the employer.
Another concern is what purpose of such advances should be. From the standpoint of a typical employer, the end is obvious: reduce labor to reduce costs and thus increase profits (and reduce labor troubles). The ideal would, presumably, to replace any human whose job can be adequately done cheaper by a machine. Of course, there is an obvious concern: to make money a business needs customers who have money. So, if profit is a concern, there must always be some people who have an income and who are not replaced by unpaid machines. One possible pinnacle of this sort of system might consist of a business model in which one person owns machines that produce goods or services that are sold to other business owners. On this model, everyone is a business owner, and everyone is a customer. This path does, of course, have some dystopian options. For example, it is easy to imagine a world in which most people are displaced, unemployed or underemployed while a small elite enjoys a lavish lifestyle supported by automation and the poor. Well, more so than our current dystopian world.
A more utopian view, the Star Trek future, is that the end of automation is to eliminate boring, dangerous, and unfulfilling jobs to free human beings from the tyranny of imposed labor. This is the scenario that anarchists like Emma Goldman promised: people would do the work they loved, rather than laboring as servants to make others wealthy. This path also has some dystopian options, such as the gentle one of Wall E. One can also imagine less gentle dystopias in which having the machines do everything for us is a nightmare.
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