And they were just as right back then as they are now about the fundamental problem: fewer and fewer humans, over time, have anything of value to contribute to

And they were just as right back then as they are now about the fundamental problem: fewer and fewer humans, over time, have anything of value to contribute to the economy. Come strong AI, and that number will rapidly drop to zero, and even the people that specialize in AI will quickly become useless in comparison to their creations... People may disagree about exactly when that will happen, but 20 years is probably a good inside guess computationally speaking, and anything much past 40 would mean that we really dropped the ball on AI software research (which is definitely possible, to be fair), so I'm not really so hot on the idea of writing off these concerns as overly premature or ill conceived. People were way off 200 years ago, but these days the literal end of human usefulness is visible on a very real horizon, possibly within our lifetimes.