This isn't universal, this is just a pattern I've noticed.

I think a lot of people think they are being replaced by a machine. Whether it is creative workers or everyday laborers, in more and more of their tasks. I would like to offer an alternative explanation, as technology is not magic, and often comes with a huge maintenance burden.

Modern labor issues ought to highlight how much corporations want to replace a mass of moderately-trained employees with an extremely specialized and overextended set of maintenance specialists. It's not "AI" it isn't "IoT", it's not "self-service", it is small traveling crews of IT maintenance people. Sometimes in combination with outsourced menial IT tasks instead of purely mechanical compute. Labor is not being automated, it is being replaced with tech workers who are at once being stretched thin and also exploiting everyone around them in shittier system maintenance roles. This is attractive to corporations because they can subcontract the tech work and use them as pawns in disputes with labor, later throwing the sub-contractor under the bus if the ploy doesn't work without losing much of anything. This can be a very incremental process, with only very small parts of work becoming pure IT maintenance at a time.