[prodigal_erik]

People survived the industrial revolution, but horses largely didn't, because for the first time ever we had machines that could replace them in nearly all of their niches. People have never been threatened in this way, even as particular industries disappeared there was mostly enough menial work to retreat to that required a little too much perception and decision-making to automate. What do they do when all menial work can be done by some machine that doesn't eat or sleep or complain? We're finally starting to raise the bar on how clever and creative you must be to be relevant on the job market, and a growing number of people are inevitably going to fall below it.

[Variance]

That's a flagrantly false analogy. But see above--it's not time for humans to be outmoded quite yet. And when it is, it won't just be low-skill jobs that disappear.

[prodigal_erik]

Why not? Jobs don't require uniform levels of creativity, and we aren't waiting for a singularity before we start. We already have GPS-guided tractors replacing farmhands and self-checkout registers starting to replace retail clerks, while white-collar fields like engineering and software have merely shed some rote work (drafting and data entry) and medicine and law have changed even less.

I think the jobs most likely to disappear are terrible wastes of human minds; I just wish we weren't so vicious towards people we can't find a need for right now.

[Variance]

This was already answered in my big comment. There is no trend towards any unemployment at all; there never has been any unemployment associated with tech growth; tech growth is smoother and more iterative than people are conceptualizing, so it's not like there's any technical reason that this would change; and the current tech is no revolutionary exception to the trends of tech growth we've had in the past. Basically, you assume that a certain level of tech growth implies that people who can't keep up with it will be out of a job, but we empirically observe that there is no reason to suspect this. The sorts of events that could break these patterns are singularities, not mobile apps.