You're probably right, but it still takes competent people to design and maintain the automation. Part of my job involves automation, and it's a hard task that requires the person doing the automating to have a very deep understanding of the task as well as the limits of the technology that's doing the automating. It's a high-IQ task in a world where our Betters seem hell-bent on lowering the IQ.

I've said it before, but the silver lining in the technocratic oligarchy we live in is that the oligarchs aren't the sort of people to inspire loyalty and are too cheap to buy an approximation of it.

And they're often not smart enough themselves to understand how hard the technical aspects of their technocracy are. They'll talk about something as complicated as (eg.) putting a cold fusion reactor into production the same way they'd talk about an oil change. Which is why they keep getting screwed by offshore engineering projects: they see the dollar signs and hear the promises and don't know enough to know they're being fleeced.