Employee compensation comes from capital. And employees are working at companies that provide robots, etc.

There's a return on capital than is not spent on employees. That reflects how much capital is growing and how much can be spent on employees in the future.

> Employee compensation comes from capital.

All human collective endeavors (with few exceptions) require 3 kinds of human-related input: capital, labor and ideas.

Nobody puts their capital into an endeavor in which the plan is for the that capital to provide renumeration for the labor for more than the shortest possible time (). The goal is always to generate revenue in sufficient volume to pay for the labor, and when that goal is met, that success is a function of all 3 kinds of contribution.

So no, employee compensation does not come from capital, but from revenue that results from the successful interaction of capital, labor and ideas.

() non-profits would be an obvious exception, except that nobody actually talks about investing capital in such organizations, we just make "donations" or "grants". That money plays the same role as capital, however.