There is no reason to believe this time is different. There is one major reason this time is different: it requires a highly educated workforce. In practice, s

There is no reason to believe this time is different. There is one major reason this time is different: it requires a highly educated workforce. In practice, since there are so many unemployed and so many underpaid, it means that most of those people are incapable of transition, for one reason or another. And it's a double whammy: even if every unemployed worker went for re-qualification / re-education, and they all became knowledge workers, the market would be saturated and everybody would end up being underpaid again (underpaid meaning "not enough to live off of comfortably / normally"). In that theoretical scenario, engineers and scientists would be dime a dozen, so even that's a dead end. Some new solution is needed. Theoretically speaking, if everything were 100% automated and dynamically produced, money would be obsolete because we could have anything built: material extraction would be automatic, processing would be automatic, resource renewal and recycling automatic, the solar energy to produce it free. But what do we do in the meanwhile?