[ska]

Not for the Luddites. This is one of the most consistently misunderstood and misused historical lessons I run into in tech circles. The true lesson of the Luddites isn't that "things will turn out better than you thought", it is that "there will be casualties".

The Luddites were basically correct - they were trading "good jobs" for fundamental unemployment. Demographically speaking the families involved did not on average recover from the damage for a few generations.

So while from a global perspective the overall change may be positive over time, you can't discount people out of hand for saying "wait a minute, we're going to get screwed hard here". They may well be right. It may still be the right thing to do.

What the policy implications of such are or should be is a separable issue.

Another potentially deep issue: the industrial revolution creating a bunch of new jobs and job categories does not demonstrate that the same will be true of a putative automation revolution that we are entering....

[marknutter]

Technological advancements displace jobs at a relatively slow pace. It doesn't happen overnight. And as those jobs get replaced, the demand for the remaining people who can do those jobs goes up because not all companies can afford to automate initially. The "casualties" you mention are more likely the future workers for a particular profession, but they're unlikely to care much having, y'know, not been born yet.

[ska]

No, that is not at all what happened with the Luddites.

Which is the point, really. This is exactly the sort of assertion that is often made ... and often the Luddites are trotted out as an example. But they are a better counterexample to what you assert than an example.