Hah, I wish that were the case. A whole lot more things would be automated if that were true.
Automation requires resources, but it also requires vision, cooperation among affected parties, a workable regulatory framework, maturity and availability of required solutions, and availability of competent integrators. There are all kinds of reasons something remains manual besides mere resource availability. And all those things change over time.
There's not much you can do about most of those things, but becoming a programmer and working to develop better solutions is one way to make a difference. Even if you don't work directly in automation, your work can trickle down to the people like me who do cencern themselves with automated sewing and strawberry harvesting.
What I mean by resources is the things you mentioned inclusive of vision.
I picked those two examples because you can literally build a robot to do it, but it is either unworkable in the case of the shirt or financially not viable like the strawberry robot.
Using your model, no technological development would ever occur because the fact that something had not happened yet would indicate that it could not possibly happen due to a lack of resources. This is the anecdote about two economists walking down the street and refusing to pick up a $100 because everyone knows that in an efficient market, someone would have already picked it up.
At some point the resources necessary for development are there but the technology itself has not actuated. This invalidates your original claim that: "Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest."
Automation requires resources, but it also requires vision, cooperation among affected parties, a workable regulatory framework, maturity and availability of required solutions, and availability of competent integrators. There are all kinds of reasons something remains manual besides mere resource availability. And all those things change over time.
There's not much you can do about most of those things, but becoming a programmer and working to develop better solutions is one way to make a difference. Even if you don't work directly in automation, your work can trickle down to the people like me who do cencern themselves with automated sewing and strawberry harvesting.