Sadly your point may be correct about automation being used right now more to control people more free them (even as technologists including me had higher hopes decades ago, e.g. Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

You may find of interest this essay on "The Mythology of Wealth" on economic mythologies used to justify social pyramids and with a small elite at the top: https://web.archive.org/web/2007*/http://conceptualguerilla....

See this online book by Marshall Brain on robots being used to concentrate wealth (see especially the chapter "Robotic Freedom" from which this text comes):
https://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation
"The Concentration of Wealth: If you look at our economy as a whole, you can understand why robots have the potential to be so disruptive if we do not handle their arrival properly. ..."

And what is often ignored is that as automation -- especially computing -- makes it possible for one person to do more, even if a human is still needed in an economic loop somewhere, it weakens the financial bargaining position of many other humans (assuming demand does not rise as fast as capacity) who must trade their labor for kanban-token-like ration units (i.e. fiat dollars) in order to survive or maybe in some cases thrive.

So we don't need full automation for all this to be very disruptive economically. And we are already seeing some of this as people with less tech or other skills are falling by the wayside economically and their marriages and lives are disintegrating (or never happening in the first place) and they turn to drugs to relieve the pain and so on leading to "deaths of despair". That is something we may see greatly accelerate as driving is automated given how important economically driving jobs are to many people with just a high school education.

But even highly rewarded skills today can become rapidly obsolete through technology (like a radiologist reading x-rays or a broker trading stocks). And eventually programmers may see that happen to their livelihoods too.

Of course, revolutions often turn out to be different then expected, as usually it is the best organized who take power (like in Iran durign the 1970s, the students revolted bu it was the better-organized religious hardliners who ultimately prevailed). Related Zinn:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."

But when you have robots guards (e.g. in the movie "Elysium"), then who cares about human revolts?

Still, there is cause for optimism (also from Zinn):
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/optimism-uncertain...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability."

See Marshall Brain's novelette "Manna" as a fictionalization of wealth concentration and total surveillance from automation and an social alternative.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" for an inspiring vision of alternative.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp...

Or Theodore Sturgeons's 1956 "The Skills of Xanadu" about the two-sided coin of freedom/subservience and technology:
https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08
https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/...

Or this essay I put together around 2010 mentions lots of alternatives (both good and bad ones):
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Ultimately though this comes down to a need for a change of heart as implied by my sig (amplifying and expanding on what many others like Albert Einstein and Bucky Fuller have said): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."