Everyone and Yang are talking about a new wave of automation and the danger we might all be thrown jobless out on the street. The new wave of automation is real and there will be consequences, but there is systematic understanding of the past, present, and future history of automation. We are presently willfully misunderstanding the nature of the consequences. The missing puzzle piece is the banal yet always amazingly taboo topic Americans always use to misunderstand the world: social class.
Perhaps there is a wave in the sense that things are moving faster and more perceptibly than usual, yet replacement of jobs with automation is a process that has been going on continuously for 150 years. Vast changes in economies all over the world have occurred as artisans were put out of work to become factory workers, then factory workers were put out of work to move to the service industry. There are still people you might call artisans, and there are certainly still factory workers, yet today Americans overwhelmingly work service jobs in a way that would be shocking to a time traveler. Many of us are already busying ourselves in jobs a previous generation might find to be surreal make-work.
This is not to say, however, that this journey was a good time for everyone. Rivers of ink have been spilled examining the consequences (economic, social, cultural, religious, everywhere!) of the disintegration of the artisan class, especially in Europe. Many felt that the new lifestyle technology had handed them was less dignified, and more tangibly that it induced a degrading level of social hierarchy (and inequality of wealth and income) that they would be better off without. People were angry, and like today there was a vitriolic populist politics to express their anger. We will always struggle to really empathize with that shift because we have only known the world they regarded as a plummet into disaster.
What is different today? The answer again revolves around social class. In the past, those who were most affected had a disproportionately small voice in public discourse. Those with jobs requiring education - jobs intimately requiring advanced literacy and numeracy - were relatively safe. These are also the jobs that grant privilege in public conversation. Journalism, which you might say has been partially automated disruptively by information technology, is an excellent prototype.
People will keep inventing new work for other people and people will keep finding ways to re-purpose their skills. What will change is the nature of our socioeconomic hierarchy… past history suggests it will become steeper and more stratified, and it is a whole other line of common public conversation that we are quite deep into this trend already. There is nothing new here, but an ancient thing that we perceive selectively.