...You basically described subcontracting. "We pay based on product and not hours spent" is what you get in independent contractor agreements.

The issue there is that contracts run out eventually, this would be a perpetual agreement.

The fundamental goal of all private enterprises is to profit.
The profit calculation is total revenue minus all operational costs. One of those operational costs is labor.
It is therefore a contradiction of the fundamental purpose of any private enterprise to continue to pay any employee past their final moment of legal obligation to do so.

My presumption is that technology eventually advances, and corporations without any human employees would eventually die because of a lack of updates to ancient systems. Consider how banks use the COBOL programming language, and how many people alive today know how to program in that language. What happens after they retire, or die? You can automate to a degree, but there's always patches and fixes and optimizations.

I figure that companies will find ways to automate all but executive roles, and I doubt the executives will always be effective programmers, so under the current system companies would eventually freeze up and cease to adapt. It's the goal of the employer to pay less for more effort, it's the goal of the employee to earn more for less effort, so which one aligns with the idea of a growing fully automated company more? You have to take advantage of peoples motivations and goals in order to completely automate a company, executives can only reach the point of not having human workers, for them the goal of expanding the company after the fact is impossible without hiring new workers, and there wouldn't be the same incentives for those workers to fix things.

Yes., companies as a general rule are short sighted. How many industries have make "entry level" require X years of experience rather than offer training to actually entry level employees? Few, if any, companies in those industries are willing to shoulder the necessary expense of training replacement workers anymore and instead are intent on poaching the dwindling supply of already trained workers off of each other.

There's myriad examples of companies that do in fact die because even with Human employees they refuse to adapt. Blockbuster could have bought Netflix and stayed ahead on the media game. Kodak could've moved to digital photography, and in fact had produced some tech relevant to it but sold it because that wasn't there focus and they weren't interested in changing. The Fossil Fuel industry knew twenty years in advance about climate change and now only feign concern over it for the sake of appearances.

Given my prior statement: That a company has an incentive not to pay any employee past their final moment of obligation to do so. I think it's quite clear that the employer's interests are in the automation of labor. The employee may have some inclination to have their work be easier or less time consuming but it is entirely within their interest to keep any knowledge of means to do that they've developed from their employer for as long as possible for the sake of maintaining their paycheck.

Creative expression and inventions are prime examples of work that continues to produce value after the labor is done. Companies are routinely very reluctant to offer or acquiesce to royalties for the creatives who make them or they have a drive to minimize said royalties to the greatest extent that they can if they cannot be eliminated. Automation is similar in this respect: Work done at some point continues to take in revenue long after. So, why should we expect that companies would treat automators any differently than animators or actors given the long standing precedent that the companies will try whatever they feel may work to stiff them?

The entry level thing requiring X years but also other contradictory requirements is actually an effort to prevent being sued for what could be valid reasons. If nobody meets their requirements and they choose to hire someone anyways then can you really argue they're biased? And if they later choose to fire that person, they can argue that the person didn't meet their requirements, probably.

From another angle, consider how many companies are trying to learn how best to fire someone, because people have started recording how they or others were fired, and then posting it online to be critiqued by the internet. Companies hate risk, and they will use any tactics they can to avoid being publicly shamed or held accountable for past actions that might cost the company that quarter.

The fossil fuel industry knew a century ago about climate change, because apparently Arvid Hogbom Svante Arrhenius calculated the effects back in 1896 (https://xkcd.com/2889/), and in 1977 Exxon predicted climate change as well, so they knew about it 47 years ago, not 20.

And yes, a company has an incentive to automate instead of hire workers, but I can guarantee that if computers in the 1980s could have run a business well enough then that company would be in a panic two decades later when the machine finally broke and couldn't be repaired or replaced any more. A worker, meanwhile, would have an incentive to keep the system updated, make it more efficient, make it require even less effort to run. I'm hoping to someday use AI to create backgrounds so I can focus on drawing characters, but right now it takes more time to generate something usable than it takes me to draw something quick. Once it saves me time to use it, I'll still want a simpler version, something faster, something better. Companies only want good enough, because better is expensive. I had a friend who worked for a international company, but the owner refused to pay for translators and told my friend to just repeat the boss's name until the other company got someone who could speak english on the line. Translators exist, but they cost money.

I think that in the long run, automation will become the domain of workers who never stop tinkering, and anything less will quickly fall behind. Right now this isn't a huge deal, many big companies can just buy out highly motivated smaller companies in order to keep up, but someday we're going to have von Neumann probes mining in space, any economic systems relying on scarcity will be overwhelmed with resources, and highly motivated automation will be able to take advantage of the gap in order to grow exponentially first.

Sorry I muddled my intended message in editing about the 'knew in advance' point: I meant to say that they knew about Climate Change and its effects twenty years before the public became broadly aware of it. Though that point is somewhat moot with the point about Arrhenius.

As for the hiring practices point I see that as a contributing factor to it, while also conveniently allowing them the shrug the burden of providing training to new employees. This is what corporations do: Externalize, shrug off, and otherwise avoid costs so as to maximize profit and it regularly blows up in their faces as they refuse to learn. Just recently we saw this happen in spectacular fashion with Twitter. One of the poster-children for failing upward bought it and subsequently removed a super-majority of its value with decisions meant to immediately increase profit.

We already live in a world of artificial scarcity. All software is effectively infinitely replicable for a negligible price and yet it's still packaged up, saddled down with additional bits to inhibit that natural function of software, and sold like it's bits of gemstone or precious metal. There's enough housing stock in, at least, the USA to house the whole of the population with housing to spare however in spite of that we have high prices for housing (in direct contrast with how supply and demand is explained) and a substantial population of those who go without this basic human need. Why? For no other reason than that it makes a few companies, not even the ones that built the housing, exceptionally wealthy and in the current system that equates quite evenly to powerful.

Companies exist to turn a profit and if they have even the barest notion of being able to get away with doing so without providing a good or service in return I don't have to speculate about them being willing to, we already have precedent for it. Of course it's all self-contradictory when one looks a little deeper: companies, the lot of them as a whole, want to minimize cost and as a part of that minimize their employees pay all the while ignoring the simple fact that for a great many of them they are directly deducing their customers ability to buy their product or service, to whatever minimal extent they are forced to provide them, and therefore in the pursuit of profit jeopardize their ability to obtain it.