Two points in response: 1. Speed matters. Going from 100% to 2% over a century is one thing, doing it in 5 years is another. Which isn't to say that it'll nece

Two points in response: 1. Speed matters. Going from 100% to 2% over a century is one thing, doing it in 5 years is another. Which isn't to say that it'll necessary be that fast, just that if it is (and there are some reasons to think it will be) that it will have serious consequences for human welfare. 2. People like to point at the industrial and digital revolutions as examples to say "hey look, you can enhance productivity without killing jobs - the jobs just move around". And that's fine, they're excellent examples of that phenomenon. However, two prior examples is not exactly overwhelming evidence, and there are at least a couple real reasons to think that 'this time is different'. Specifically, that AI is getting really good at mimicking humans for particular tasks. We certainly don't have general AI yet, but what we do have can get really good at a whole lot of low-skill, low-education jobs, and a few high-skill high-education ones too. When the industrial revolution happened human jobs persisted because humans could use judgment and learn new things. It was too expensive to automate everything that could in principle be automated, because your processes might change tomorrow. New manufacturing tech is much better at reconfigurability, so that defense is likely out. New AI techniques are able to replicate human judgment in many scenarios now too. Not all of course, but many. If you eliminate all jobs that involve a human doing a particular physical task, you're not left with a whole lot for third world or low-education first-worlders to do. Now, all that being said, would I be extremely surprised if automation came along and labor markets simply retooled around it and everything was fine? No, not really. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way either, and I think it's something we should take pretty seriously.