Maybe, but this seems to assume that there aren't a sufficiently large quantity of the already well off whose "values as people" aren't centered around protecting their own short-term relative position in society. I think the history of humanity and what it takes to get change that distributes some of the benefits of progress rather than concentrating in the already-best-off suggest that this assumption may be unjustified.

That's the hard part. Automation is coming whether we like it or not, because is being forced into our throats by the combined mechanisms of our economy (or by The System, or Moloch, call it what you like). But "reflecting on our values" requires coordination of the whole society. Which is hard. We might coordinate eventually, when the going by gets too hard, just like people eventually fixed the industrial revolution - but it took riots and revolutions and communism spreading over half of the planet to get there. If we want to do this before blood gets spilled, we need to find a way to coordinate sooner.

I'm still not sure how we can approach that.