> and eventually low end work simply becomes too costly to not automate anymore.
Evidence from Japan (a looking glass into a declining demographic future) does not validate this thesis. Some work can be automated (kiosks for order taking, for example), but most lower wage work cannot (especially manual labor around child care and healthcare). Wages will rise, that is the unavoidable inflationary component of structural demographics and the participant rate decline. Supply vs demand.
In the US, there are already shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers), bus drivers, railroad workers, farm workers, construction workers, day care staff, correctional officers, enlisted military recruits, etc [1]. ~4M Boomers retire per year, ~11k per day. Older folks (55+) are what is holding up participation rate because they cannot afford to retire [2], but they age out at a rate of ~2M/year, and ~37M of them are in the labor force [3].
Japan is actually the anti-thesis of your argument. They move young Japanese kids to Thailand to work call service jobs (they can pay them less there). They went through a huge automation push in the 80s/early 90s because they could n't find enough people to work in their factories, and this only went away in the late 90s when China came online with cheaper labor. Heck, it is ironic that the automation that we associate with China today is exactly what we associated with Japan in until the 00s! Now Japan is kind of messed up: kids are not finding it easy to deal with jobs whose salaries aren't rising (or their company sends them to work in Thailand).
We are already there, heck, China knows they will be there soon. Japan is definitely having issues with kids not wanting to work for peanuts anymore (so offering them an adventure in Bangkok). With the US on its current Trump-inspired anti-intellectualism kick, it is very likely that we will be buying automation equipment from China 10 or so years from now to do deal with coming labor shortages (assuming we don't just try to fix it with immigration again).
Evidence from Japan (a looking glass into a declining demographic future) does not validate this thesis. Some work can be automated (kiosks for order taking, for example), but most lower wage work cannot (especially manual labor around child care and healthcare). Wages will rise, that is the unavoidable inflationary component of structural demographics and the participant rate decline. Supply vs demand.
In the US, there are already shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers), bus drivers, railroad workers, farm workers, construction workers, day care staff, correctional officers, enlisted military recruits, etc [1]. ~4M Boomers retire per year, ~11k per day. Older folks (55+) are what is holding up participation rate because they cannot afford to retire [2], but they age out at a rate of ~2M/year, and ~37M of them are in the labor force [3].
[1] HN Search: Labor shortages - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] Are Older Workers Propping Up The U.S. Economy? - https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/08/are-older-work... - August 8th, 2022
[3] FRED: Labor Force Participation Rate - 55 Yrs. & over (LNS11324230) - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230