I believe you may have overlooked one of my key points: we did not have any useful way to predict those consequences at the time production was being automated

I believe you may have overlooked one of my key points: we did not have any useful way to predict those consequences at the time production was being automated that would have marked them out as particularly likely. Automation started in the 1780s, with the industrial revolution. The initial impacts had a lot to do with creating vast numbers of jobs, driving down the cost of all kinds of consumer goods, and heavily driving urbanization. I can't see any easy way to get from there to the rust belt if I'm someone looking forward in 1780. Right now we can treat this as obvious only because we have the benefit of hindsight. I cannot imagine any way in which the modern history of Detroit would have been reasonably and usefully predictable from 1780 (at the time it was a frontier fort under British military control). You're right, impacts can be decades off. They can even be centuries off. There were a lot of equally credible people who thought automation was going to have utopian consequences that didn't include people losing their productive economic positions. This isn't a binary, either. There were plenty of other possible outcomes as well. How were people in 1780 to know what we do know? What happens if every predicted outcome is taken seriously? What happens if they're then all wrong, or not right on a sufficient timescale? I know how I would expect that to interact with limited government resources. At the end of it, I think we're likely limited to dealing with consequences and trivially short-term prediction. Those, at least, we have a reasonable shot of observing.