No, Mike, he does not. YOU are and have been making a different one, and a silly one if I might add. A "burden"? Do you think you or I have a job because our employers are interested in carrying out social policy? My company is transitioning from being a regular (corporate) travel agency to being a "platform company" because they make more money doing so. Look at my earlier example of reporting at my job. They charge for those reports, and so what might look like makework to me or you becomes a new revenue stream for them, because what earlier involved a great deal of work for one client occasionally became feasible to do for many regularly because the marginal cost of generating them came down. Automation freed up company resources to pursue other revenue opportunities.
Companies don't hire people if they don't feel they need to. You're making the same mistake the weavers made in the 19th century, assuming that since everybody made do with one or two pairs of clothes in the past (unless they were very rich) that adding machines that could do the same work very quickly meant that they would no longer have jobs, rather than what actually happened which was that now they sold multiple sets of clothes cheaply to everybody, driving a tremdndous growth in the employment of cotton farmers, coal miners, machinists, factory workers, and the like. Likewise my employer has added programmers and analysts and sales people, even as they farm out more and more of the actual travel agent jobs to partner agencies (increasing the total number of travel agents in the process).
Companies don't hire people if they don't feel they need to. You're making the same mistake the weavers made in the 19th century, assuming that since everybody made do with one or two pairs of clothes in the past (unless they were very rich) that adding machines that could do the same work very quickly meant that they would no longer have jobs, rather than what actually happened which was that now they sold multiple sets of clothes cheaply to everybody, driving a tremdndous growth in the employment of cotton farmers, coal miners, machinists, factory workers, and the like. Likewise my employer has added programmers and analysts and sales people, even as they farm out more and more of the actual travel agent jobs to partner agencies (increasing the total number of travel agents in the process).