How did you arrive at 500 humans replaced by Myki? This article shows 30-50k rail employees.
Rail employees nationally, for public transport, freight, maintenance, everything. You didn't even follow the links in your own article you showed us:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Trains_Melbourne"Metro Trains Melbourne is also responsible for 218 railway stations and employs a workforce of 3,500 rail professionals including train drivers, mechanical and electrical engineers, network operations specialists and customer service representatives."
There are 218 stations. Most are staffed already; around 1985, Flinder Street Station had 3 guys at windows, 3 guys at the gates, and a guy who came out and changed the clocks to show the next train on each line, 7 people at peak times; now they have 1 guy at the window, 1 guy sitting behind a computer changing the times on the clocks, 2 groups of 4 ticket inspectors, 1 person on each of 8 platforms making announcements at peak times, and so on - they employ
more people with Myki and other electronic systems than they did before that. But then, some suburban stations are unstaffed, and others are only staffed for part of the day.
Of course, some staff aren't counted in the wiki. Unstaffed stations made people feel insecure (crime rates, including crime on railways, have dropped, but people
feel insecure), the government decided to put cops on the train lines. The cops didn't want to do it, so the government hired Protective Services Officers (formerly just court and state building security guys), with lower standards than VicPol. They have
two per train station, plus admin staff etc, so that's 500 staff just there - they're part of the cost of the train network, but they don't count. $80 million a year cost there.
Any calculations of cost vs Myki must allow for not only the original $1,500 million cost, but the $700 million for the next 7 years, and so on.
Myki is a Melbourne-only system, and like all technological solutions was supposed to replace people. However, as they found when they first brought in fancy ticketing systems back in the 90s, those old conductors they fired, many of them had to be re-hired as ticket inspectors. A conductor notices you jump a turnstile, a ticketing machine doesn't. So they have ticket inspectors.
The ticket inspectors and "customer service representatives" go back to being conductors. We don't need even half as many PSOs if the stations are staffed. Allowing an extra 2 employees per station on average, plus 10-20% more to allow for sick and holiday leave, training and so on, gets us around 500 people. So we'd only need 500
more public transport workers in Melbourne than we already have, and we could go back to having staff at every station from first train to last, and people on platforms, etc.
Now, we won't do that, of course. Because of sunk cost fallacies and no government can take police off the streets, the timid middle class won't stand for it. But the point is: technology here has not saved us money and made people unemployed, it's actually cost us a lot, lot more - and lead to a lot, lot more employment. Usually it's educated jobs, but not always - cf PSOs.
I generally think that tech is not adopted until it is cost competitive. Well that's almost certainly the case in private industry where the bottom line drives decisions.
You're on a discussion forum which is founded on the premise that most people just piss away their money, and you are asserting that tech is adopted rationally?
Technology does not replace people or reduce costs. It
changes jobs and often means more education is needed. Despite going from typewriters to photocopiers and personal computers, we have more people working in offices than ever before; but instead of just going to Secretarial College, they have to do a Bachelors in something. So the universities have to expand to accommodate more students. And those students graduate with a student loan debt, so they demand higher salaries. And the computers cost money, and take power, and require more of the airconditioning, and people have to set the computers up and maintain them with their frequent breakdowns.
So in the end, the office with computers costs
a lot more to run than did the office with typewriters. The people edged out are those unable or unwilling to get an education. There are indeed losers in this game of social change - but it's not because of minimum wage, it's because we think technology is cool, man.