Monsanto & Con-Agra want a piece of that action. Genetically engineered aqua farming for purposes of whale oil harvesting, what's not to like?

You're living in fantasy land if you think things are going to work that cleanly. Yes, a module based approach is a good idea and will help to standardize and automate the environment in a way that increases productivity. No, it's not magic and the normal problems of complex environments aren't going to just go away in a puff of code. That's ok though, layer on as much extra complexity as you want, it just means I'll end up getting paid more to untangle the mess.

It wasn't my choice, a previous poster used it and I just rolled with it. Basically the "work pool" would be the sum of all jobs we'd like people to do if there were human labor available and no automation existed that could do it better. It's a superset that includes the jobs currently in the economy as well as ones that aren't but could be. Humanity has traditionally had a labor shortage that prevented us from filling all of the jobs in the work pool. For example, many manufacturing jobs were in the pool, making more shovels for example, but farming took precedence until enough labor was automated out of that sector to make it worthwhile. There are other ways to explain this phenomenon of course.

If you think that building new server instances is the main function of sysadmins then you have a very strange view of the job. I agree that the new configuration tools will make a job that VMs & scripting had made easy even easier. It looks like you're mostly engaged in a game of "rename the job" in order to show it going away. *shrug* Yes, over the next 10-20 years I expect the overall number of sysadmins to decline and the required skill levels to rise, but the job isn't going anywhere.

Labor force participation rates are not a measure of net change in the size of the work pool.

That's extremely unlikely without significant AI. Sysadmin work is rarely rote and thus difficult to automate. There are some portions that can be enhanced using new tools and that will likely lead to productivity increases and reduced total need for sysadmins, but that's no where near what you're talking about. Scripting is not a new thing.

Yes, those other things increase the work pool. The net change is tough to measure though.

That is indeed something that happens when the minimum wage is increased due to some jobs not being economic at the new minimum price. That's not what I was talking about though, technology has eliminated huge numbers of jobs. For example, you'll find virtually zero positions for humans to act as grain reapers now, yet at one time that was a huge use of labor. That shrinks the overall work pool. At the time, it didn't matter so much because the work pool was still vastly larger than the labor pool, so after a very painful period of readjustment those workers mostly moved on to other positions. (largely in manufacturing)

Well, that labor will get a zero bid when tendered on the labor market due to automation being a perfect (and cheaper) substitute. I wasn't attempting to make a value judgement about their worth as a person.

False, the available work pool has shrunk enormously, it's just that despite shrinkage it's always still been larger than the labor pool. We appear to be approaching a situation where that may no longer be the case.

It increases the marginal productivity of higher value labor, which is a slightly more nuanced version of what you're saying. Labor with a value lower than that of the automation is now worthless. Over time the value of the automation keeps rising while the value of human labor has some pretty hard limits. In the past this problem was solved by the lower value labor moving to other sectors of the economy that weren't yet automated. The problem is, they're running out of sectors to move to. The resource sector is highly automated, the manufacturing sector is getting that way and now it's encroaching on the service sector. The remaining portions of the economy after you subtract those three are pretty small, it's hard to see how they're going to expand enough to absorb all of those extra people.

Most definitions of a living wage I've seen look pretty reasonable. Food, housing, clothing, utilities, basic transportation, health care, a minimal amount of recreation. That's about as low as you can go without just being human cattle.

It all depends on how good the killbots are and of course whether or not they have a pre-set kill limit.

Well the other option is to accept that there may be mass starvation, social unrest and possibly a civil war. Frankly a social safety net sounds cheaper.

Which is a serious concern for society as a whole, but not something individual employers can really afford to take into account. It's a classic market failure due to externality.