This problem arise because "work" currently serves two distinct and entirely unrelated purposes:

1. It serves as a mechanism for getting stuff done. All the products and services that humanity needs must be produced somehow; currently the main mechanism for this is that people work.
2. It serves as the primary mechanism for distributing income to most adults.

Let's say increased automatization means we can get the same products and services made using only half as many working hours.

If that simply meant your working-day would now be 4 hours per day, for the same pay, I doubt many would complain about it all that much; higher productivity is awesome!

But the problem is, odds are it'll instead result in half the workers being fired and losing their income, while the other half continues for roughly the same pay as today, the benefits of increased productivity go mostly solely to the "owners".

And ownership is a LOT more unevenly distributed than capacity to work is. That's especially true for low-educatiion-needed work.

Let me put it this way; nobody is 10 times as efficient as the average adult at picking strawberries, driving a taxi, or peeling potatoes. Inequality in capacity for manual labor is real, but fairly modest. But nothing prevents one person from OWNING more than 1000 average adults. When income is predominantly distributed to owners balooning inequality is the result.

My preferred solution is to disconnect #1 and #2 above. Not in the sense of doing away with work, but in the sense of having it no longer be the sole realistic source of income for most adults.

We could for example create an UBI -- and set it at a certain percentage of GDP/capita. Doing it that way has the advantage that progress in productivity will benefit everyone in a given country. It could be financed with taxes, primarily on the owning-class, but also on things that have negative externalities in accordance with classical capitalist theory for how to create efficient markets.