What I'm proposing is not communism, where ownership is held by the state. In fact, what I'm proposing is starkly different.

I'm proposing the direct ownership of automation technology/companies by the workers themselves, not by their government.

This is in keeping with a political philosophy called distributism, which advocates for the widest possible (private) ownership of productive property. Proponents of distributism typically view both capitalism and socialism as systems that tend toward a small number of people holding power over a large amount of capital. (In the case of capitalism, super wealthy investors, and in the case of socialism, government officials.) They see widespread private ownership of productive property as a way of neutralizing the dangers of both Big Business and Big Government.

Socialism is literally where workers control the means of production themselves, and communism was the end-point where the state disappeared.