I see automation scaling the less useful things, while the stuff we really need (on site trades, healthcare, child care, farming, etc) is having a hard time scaling.
Oh, yes, some stuff scales badly for sure, but for example farming scales hugely! Medieval societies required 80-90% farmers in Western Europe, it's now somewhere around 1-2%.
Yes, but we seem to have plateaued there. Also, that 1% to 2% is for grains and other stuff that can be easily harvested with large machines, which is awesome, but the delicate fruits and vegetables and nuts from more tropical places seem to be far above 1% to 2%.
By headcount, but I am not sure that tells the whole story. After all, a retiree who owns farmland, but lets another farmer do the work, can still be legally considered a farmer himself. I suspect even the average farmer working in the fields is spending considerably less time there than he would have in the past.
And that's with most farmers not even using the latest and greatest technology. If we imagine a world where only the highest capacity state-of-the-art machines are put to use, a lot of the farmers would struggle to find any work to do.
Completely autonomous farming vehicles have only been a thing for a few years and not been universally adopted yet (partly due to the high cost). I suspect there are still some ways to go here.
You are confounding what's necessary for our survival from what people may want/desire.
Fruit/vegetables as we know today are largely unnecessary and a luxury we have learned to love. In fact, most of the love for it comes from rich people posturing about it because they have both the means to buy them and time to process them.
When you look at them objectively, they are extremely bad from an effort to payoff point of view, making them purely pleasure/status driven food.
If you clock back just a hundred years you will realize that most fruits/veggies were not even well known (at least not in their modern form) and not something to worry about.
The pizzas with tomato sauce were created because basically nobody wanted this weird unknown fruit coming from the new world. Brussel sprouts so bitter that most people could not even digest them properly and they were truly disgusting to eat (basically food poisoning).
I could go on and on but the fact is vegetable and fruits are something we do purely for pleasure, we have improved the farming efficiency on many of them but it hardly matters for most of them because more supply doesn't mean the surplus will necessarily get eaten (you need to have people both richer and with more time for that).
In fact, the whole "organic" thing is something related to this fact, it's rich people who wanted to raise the stakes for purchasing veggies because it has become "too cheap" with imports (thanks to low wage cost in exporting countries).
The proper farming that actually feeds the world has already scaled beyond the point where it's reasonable to try and squeeze more out of it. In fact, the problem has become to manage the thing economically because over supplying makes some extremely large operations with big fixed costs a gamble.
