I don't expect that evolution to come from the (current) US culture, but what we all need to invent, especially here on slrpnk.net, is a post-labor society. Consumption and desire-driven, constrained more by ressources usage than by labor costs.

Depending on how fast we imagine it as an utopia, we lower it chances to become a neo-feudeal dystopia.

Automation is NOT an issue, by that logic we should all be outside tending fields and crops

Slavery. That's the point. You are simply fuel for the exploitation machine. Homelessness is criminalized, so you'll be put into a for profit prison when you can't find a job and forced into manual labor.

Meanwhile, billionaires escape to their tropical island bunkers and ride out the climate collapse in the ultimate "fuck you, got mine'."

Pour out a piss bottle for the human workers who will be fired because of this, and prepare for those empty piss bottles to be filled with oil as the robots leak into them after being worked through their breaks.

First largest is Walmart, in case anyone else was curious

I've taken the tour. The whole warehouse saces money by having all the lights off. The bots literally comes out of the darkness to deliver products to where the people grab each product from several of those boxes to then deliver the products to the trucks. The packagers just grab from the specific bot shelves and put into cardboard boxes of the right size. That's all they do for an eternity.

We need UBI, rent controls, price controls and probably 100 other things to protect us from the ripple effect these techs are going to have on employment. On its face, there is nothing wrong with a robots doing certain tasks, its menial work and we should be automating those things for the betterment of mankind, but en-masse there will be less jobs available and this will lead to trajedy in a lot of communities.