If the first problem with our reader's formulation is that nothing we do can be automated, the second problem is that everything can be automated. In the reduced sense that applies, everything can be automated. So as soon as you are convinced you have automated the simplest human activity, you are climbing a ladder possessing no special rung to mark a stopping place. When, finally, the supervisor is supervising only machines, there's no reason for the supervisor himself not to become a machine. So the idea that automation relieves us from grunt work in order to concentrate on higher things looks rather like the opposite of the truth.
Automation tends continually to reduce the higher work to mechanical and computational terms.
At least, it does this when we lose sight of the full reality of the work, reconceiving it as if its entire significance lay in the few decontextualized structural features we can analogize in a machine. This is not to say that, for example, endless hours spent manually adding columns of numbers would prove rewarding to most people. In general, the grunt work we want to get rid of is the result of automation, and while additional automation may relieve us of that particular work, it also recasts a yet wider sphere of work in terms seemingly fit only for automation. I've only suggested that we avoid deluding ourselves about automation freeing us for higher things. Any investigation of the matter will reveal that the machine's pull is most naturally downward.