While true this is different. Previous automation tended to create more jobs overall. It sucks to be a coal miner in Appalachia but now you have higher paid jobs building, operating, fixing big machines. Society as a whole benefits. Automation really only happened for specific scenarios and there’s always so much that automation couldn’t do

However the new phase of automation, self-driving vehicles, ai, humanoid robots, promise to automate things that only humans could do until now. We may suddenly see a significant percentage of jobs disappear to automation, without creating new jobs for humans. They also promise to be adopted far faster than society can adapt. Businesses become more efficient but overall number jobs goes down . Permanently

Consider Tesla self-driving vehicles. There are already millions of tesla cars out in society that can be self-driving, plus soon tens of thousands of semis. If self-driving succeeds, that could easily be hundreds of thousands of uber and taxi jobs, and tens of thousands of trucker job gone in as little as a year. And no new jobs created

Consider humanoid robots. The promise is mass produced by the hundreds of thousands and easily trainable without the infrastructure and scaling limitations of existing industrial robots. Every amazon warehouse job gone. As fast as they can be shipped. No new jobs created

Consider ai. Previous rounds of automation have helped software developers do more faster better, leading to explosive growth in the field. If ai actually works that would be hundreds of thousands of coders gone, with very few new jobs