Regarding your airplane example, it's actually the opposite: plane crashes are so infrequent that you have to believe "I am special" (with a negative twist) if you think you are likely to be in a crash.

They're a lot more frequent than many realise: http://www.planecrashinfo.com/database.htm & https://aviation-safety.net/database/

Although per passenger mile, it's true that air is very safe overall.

Scheduled flights inside or between advanced countries are incredibly safe. Unscheduled flights and any flights in non advanced¹ countries aren't that safe.

The overall statistics are not useful for evaluating your next trip. You must use the ones from your cohort.

1 - Mostly, the countries with broken governments. If human rights aren't respected, that's a great predictor that flights aren't safe.

That's a non answer.

If some belief applies to everybody, but on a different degree (per individual, or per job sector, etc), then the mere fact that it applies on everybody doesn't say anything to explain this variability.

And if what you say is that it applies to everybody with no variability, then that is obviously wrong. People in specific job sectors are way more worried about automation than people in other sectors, even if their jobs are not yet starting to get automated. E.g. office workers vs surgeons...

Not only do I believe that my job can be automated - I've spent years trying to do just that.

Of course, I wouldn't be giving the scripts to my employer, just spending more time doing other things...

I think the difference here is "task" !== "job". You're automating tasks. Your job is to keep the system running as effectively as possible (I don't know what you actually do). Meanwhile, I do get that you're not actively trying to lose the responsibility of these tasks, i.e. "I wouldn't be giving the scripts to my employer", but that is because you're trying to hold onto the relaxed transition phase between tasks X, Y, Z to tasks 1, 2, 3. If you really had job security issues, you would not have written those scripts.

Are you sure you haven't perhaps fallen prey to too much job security? Such a large sense of job security that you don't care about automating X part of it away. You, like me, like other "rockstar" software developers, (perhaps[0]) believe it doesn't matter if you automate X, Y, Z, because you're so good, that when you're out of responsibilities you will be offered the followup/orthogonal tasks 1, 2, 3.

Anyways, I'm just trying to highlight that you too, perhaps subconsciously, think "I am special, it wont happen to me", because at least I who also don't care about automation feel this way.

[0] I know for me, this is the truth. This overconfidence is why I don't care about automating my tasks away. Honestly, even giving the scripts to my employer makes little difference to me.

To some extent what you say is true, but only partly.

I'm not part of the cult of the "rockstar programmer". I do write a lot of good code, and I tend to do it much faster than other programmers that I work with. But programming is not actually my job description.

Without going into details - I do something else for living, that uses computers quite heavily, and automating my job is more of a hobby. I have a huge amount of flexibility in what I do, so there is an element of substituting 1,2,3 for X,Y,Z because I find them more interesting. My boss wouldn't care one way or another - he is more interested in whether or not the tasks get finished, and maintaining a high quality level in the final product.

You actively sabotage your employer by keeping part of the code you write secret?

Not at all. I do keep part of the code that I write secret. This is not a form of sabotage. My employer likes the fact that the things that I am responsible for run smoothly.

If you wrote those scripts during work time, they might as well belong to your employer.

While that would be true of IP in the US, it is not true where I live and the scripts belong to me.