[moojah]

Not really. The effect of self driving cars may be larger than "normal tech evolutions", but we have been continually re-inventing ourselves at a pace that is not particularly different from what it has been over the last 200 years.

200 years ago 95+% of all people worked in agriculture. In developed countries, now barely 1-2% do so. 100 years ago the vast majority worked in manual labour jobs. Now people are moving on to service jobs. Macro-economically speaking, those were much larger and more rapid changes than what we're seeing right now.

This is not new. It's normal economic development. Nothing unusual at all. People have to stop portraying this negatively, and Marc is correct in seeing this as a positive to humanity.

His argument is that we need to manage this shift as a society. Some countries pro-actively do so (European social security comes to mind), others do not (USA). I tend to agree with him that it does need to be managed.

[bambax]

You're right that the Industrial Revolution was incredibly violent and cruel, but that's not the point "Marc" was trying to make. He was trying to say we're destroying and creating jobs all the time, so nothing to see here.

What we're doing, now, is destroying whole sectors of the job market.

It has happened before, yes! -- but it was horrible then, and it will be horrible now (and now we have youtube, which they didn't have in the UK or India in the 19th century).