If you look into what the “Mondragón route” is, you’ll understand the differences to the current system.

To sum it up, Mondragón is a federation of worker owned/controlled enterprises/cooperatives. Due to this innovative ownership model democracy is intertwined in all decisions in the companies. Therefore, Jim (workers) gets a real say on how automation is leveraged.

About the possible career change. Mondragón handles it quite gracefully in my opinion. They have internal recruitment that attempts to relocate “obsolete” workers to other parts of the federation, as to avoid severing work relations entirely. They also invested early on in internal capacity to teach themselves through their technical schools. This way the profit of the automation is paying for the education of the workers it replaced.

In my opinion, go the Mondragón route. Bring democracy into the enterprise and allow those who work to control how they work. That way those who are being “automated” away can have a voice in what to do next.

Also, your vision of human capacity is very limiting. Why can’t Jim learn new skills? Everyone does it, literally all the time. Even construction workers have domain knowledge on how to pour cement that they learnt from others.

If there is truly no capacity in that enterprise a social safety net might be the only viable option.

Automation is great , everything should be automated as much as possible.

IF everyone benefits from it in the form of higher wages/less working hours due to the higher productivity.