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.
None of you have addressed the real talking points behind the issue. The real points to be addressed are:
1) Declining returns of increased complexity and specialization
2) The fact the human brain is not elastic and can't just adapt to infinite complexity
One can make the argument that high complexity exerted onto the finite system of the human brain is just a synonym for the word "stress". This is why lots of mathematicians go insane. Some brains are better able to handle complexity than others, but there's a relative hard limit here, and the entire population cannot and will not just shift into permanent, exponential complexity. It would take a minimum of something like a hundred thousand to a million years to evolve into it, if even possible due to physical structural limits (extrapolated from the cognitive difference in Europeans and Africans and the 50,000-100,000 years of genetic isolation between the two).
The other issue is that there are no returns to be had by increasing complexity. For example, the Joseph Tainter comparison about the US defense budget, where it requires x% of the budget to create an airplane one year, with that percentage increasing every single year until it requires leveraging the knowledge and capital of the entire population to create one airplane. There's just no benefit to be had. All you do by increasing complexity past a certain point is overspecializing where if a shortage pops up in one sector to keep the machine running, the entire civilization collapses into a dark ages. This is probably why cyclical dark ages are inevitable, to correct overspecialization.
The day you try to force everyone to "become a programmer or designer", you will have another dark ages the day afterwards.
Or to put it more simply, when you walk through your house past the various instruments now required by humans in day to day life such as a refrigerator, do you have any idea how to build one yourself from scratch? The answer is no. Well, I'm sure Anonymint is going to lie to me and claim he can build a Kenmore refrigerator from scratch out of various objects he can find on the beach of the Philippines, but that's besides the point. The point is, humans are likely far more specialized than they should be when you have entire towns and cities of huge populations where not a single person can build a computer, refrigerator, or even a steam engine themselves, unlike in the 1700's to early 1900's where people could still build or fix most objects in the house themselves.