Do you think lack of labor will force automation?

Kind of agree with you. But, I don't think that Automation will have as big of an impact as you think.  Like even of you look at Amazons warehouses, extremely efficient but they are still trying to hire 150,000 people for the holidays.  Also, I think the one main thing with automation is the resources required to run automation.  depending on how useful the automation is, there may not be a need for automation, as humans may be cheaper.   

It is a balancing game.  Automation tends to start in high labor low value add jobs and progresses up from there.  The primary issue involves fundamental restructuring of the economic system and what that does to long term expansion of automation.    If you create so much automation that there is no choice but a fully redistributive governance model well then you kind of killed your ability to continue innovation.  This idea that well there will be a baseline living standard but people can work to move themselves up from there.  If there is nothing left for most people to do their lives will be pointless and aimless.  This is where revolutions come from more than just poverty.  A lack of purpose coupled with poverty creates the conditions for radical change.  The automation change needs to be managed carefully from a corporate level.  I don't want the government anywhere near this.  We almost need a price fixing style cabal to enforce compliance with the speed at which organizations can automate.   But this will basically be impossible to do because there is too much advantage to being early.  

I think its reasonable but 20 yrs not likely. Once automation begins, labor supplies will still be relatively the same so maybe wages will fall… But in the short run, this will likely only continue to impact low skilled labor. The bigger question: how do you protect yourself/your career and how do you adjust your portfolio if required?

From a pure economics point of view. Automation is considered a technological improvement. This is simply an input into the Solow growth model. Meaning we should grow at a faster rate.  

It is also simple economics with the workers. Incentivize workers by offering higher pay or lose out on producer surplus due to deadweight loss, because you have a shortage in quantity supplied. (This is literally intro econ). As soon as it is marginally beneficial for a firm to raise wages they will. 

In the long run, I think people's desire to not want to be homeless will force the crisis to end.  It's ridiculous how long the benefits lasted, but I think their current bargaining position will prove short lived.  

A key assumption often overlooked is whether or not technology and labor are substitutes. If you think of automation in the self-driving trucks replacing truck drivers, it seems like that are. However consider a technology that lets someone perform their job more efficiently (cloud storage over emailing files back and forward), it seems like this technology saves labor hours and increases the marginal product of labor: hence this case technology is complementary to labor.

• If technology and labor are substitutes: reduction in labor supply --> increase in wages --> increase in technology demand and therefor price, use, and 'automation'
• If technology and labor are complementary: reduction in labor supply --> increase in wages --> less demand for technology, lower price, less investment in technology

Also, consider whether technology might be complementary for certain groups but a substitute for others. For example, high-skilled professions may find new technology to be complementary but be a substitute for lower-skilled works (ex: a technology that auto updates slide decks to latest market data may increase the effectiveness of a VP but reduce the demand for analyst hours by 1%) (a more realistic ex: an auto scheduling technology may make the life easier of a professional that has a lot of meetings but reduce the demand for secretaries who manually do this).

I suspect this is the thesis playing out: technology is a substitute for low-skilled workers but complementary to high-skilled workers. Hence, it is therefor also likely a contributor to wage inequality as those in the highest wage quartile will be more effective and have a higher marginal product of labor and therefor wage, whilst those in the lowest quartile will be less in demand and have downward pressure on their wages. Although we can only a correlation, we have seen wage inequality rise since the 1960s in the USA in line with technological progress.

As for your question: how does a labor shortage effect automation (/ technology). This depends on the substitution elasticity of tech and workers, but I suspect if they follow a pattern as outlined above then a labor shortage will lead to overall increase in wages, however a larger increase for high-skilled workers, and an overall increase in wage inequality and technology investment.

(This argument is mostly outlined in Acemoglu, Karabarbounis literature)

Automation has had nothing but a short term and localized impact on unemployment over the last 200 years when things have been automated.

Even though that pussy Yang lost both times, he managed to get automation = bad in the minds of many Americans.  I do think there should be some sort of retraining for late career workers whose jobs have been automated though.

Everytime I go to the damn grocery store no checkout aisles are open, exclusively self checkout. What do you think?

So long as young Americans can meet their basic living needs and insta flex via dance skills on tik tok and/or body parts on onlyfans, the need for automation will continue to grow. 

We just experienced a recession on the scale of the Great Depression, the media frames massive unemployment as a labor shortage because it doesn't sound nearly as bad. We are absolutely deep in the shit, not nearly as bad as it was earlier, but large swathes of the financial world are unsurprisingly insulated from this. The new infrastructure bill is something like a New Deal, and maybe a lot more people will go into trades and get back to work.

On Wall Street, you have some guy on a trading floor who made record profits from the exact same crash, or you have a bank that got bailed out by the fed. If the fed keeps printing Bidenbux and handing them out, it is going to be a threat to our financial system. Money is a unit of trust, it is a product of value through work. If you are paying people massive amounts of new money to add nothing to the GDP, you are going to devalue your currency.