What gets me is we all know automation is coming, but so few people put any effort at all into figuring out how it works and how they could improve their jobs and wages with it.
many people will lose their jobs because of automation and that will be a big problem.
Not entirely true. Automation also creates loads of jobs. It requires technical innovation, designers, programmers, builders ect.. Why would we 'humans' perform hard labor if we can program and build machines to do it for us? We need to keep evolving

I'd rather have more machines do labor for us so others can focus on taking care of our elder people or other stuff that matters more.
The people who take care of the elders are called "children". And we haven't had enough of them for the past 30 years.
It could easily be argued that the pension old people get should be proportional to the number of kids they sired, and possibly grandkids as well. If we have to have a socialist state, that is.