[a_humean]

I'm afraid you have completely misunderstood him/her. I'm pretty certain that he believes the industrial revolution eventually brought about amazing social change and genuine life improvements for everyone that made life much much less 'short, brutish, and hard'.

The point wasn't that automation is bad (it clearly is not), but that if we continue to automate without a plan for how we deal with mass unemployment, then automation will lead to mass human suffering of a different kind.