I would say that the pattern does not take into account the actual details of the types of automation that have been occurring and further, it takes a myopic vi

I would say that the pattern does not take into account the actual details of the types of automation that have been occurring and further, it takes a myopic view of "unemployment" to prove itself correct. In fact, automation has caused massive unemployment through history if you broaden your view of what "employment" means. The first stage of automation/industrialization used crude technology in the simplest way, for the brute force it could provide. At first you needed your factory to be close to a river so you could use a water wheel for power, and you needed a team of oxen to plow your field. In both of these cases all you needed was linear power greater than a human could provide. Once we figured out steam power and the ability to create simple linear motion in a piston, we didn't have to build our factories on rivers anymore, and thus rivers became "unemployed" in the sense that we no longer had to "employ" them to create things. Same with animals such as oxen that just provided simple brute force pulling/pushing something. Think about the relative ubiquity of the term "ox" in literature from the past and then think about the last time you actually saw an ox. Clearly animals have been dealing with rampant unemployment for quite a while. The second stage of industrialization moved up the food chain and focused on automating things that were repetitive but required more complicated movements and dexterity. The sort of thing that we used to rely on assembly lines to do and such. At the previous level we replaced providers of brute labor with no dexterity. At this level we replaced providers of fine but repetitive labor, and still unemployment wasn't that bad because people could still move up the value chain and do finer labor that required decision making. The third stage of industrialization focused on replacing fine labor that required decision making, where now you have a giant robotic arm that handles all of the spot welding, painting, and assembly of a car for example. If you don't think that this has resulted in a rise in unemployment then you haven't travelled through the American mid-west recently. Because at this third stage we are starting to replace people who are then unable to move up the value chain into labor based solely on analysis and reasoning, both because there are fewer of these jobs and because not everyone can do them. We are now in the fourth stage of industrialization and it is here that we are really going to come to grips with massive automation induced unemployment, because automation has moved sufficiently up the value chain, from brute force, to fine but repetitive labor, to labor requiring limited decision making, and finally to labor requiring reasoning as its primary component. Look outside your window, look at all of the cabs driving down the street and realize that once a computer can drive a car, and it will be able to in a decade or less, all of those jobs will be obsolete. And if a computer can drive a car it can probably analyze an x-ray or mri, it can translate a document via ocr, it can cook your fast food, it can write a sports recap, and it can balance the books. Once this level of the value chain is displaced where do these people go? Into jobs requiring creative work? Jobs requiring design or analytical work? How many of those will there be, and is that a realistic alternative for everyone? No, the Luddite Fallacy is just a convenient way to avoid thinking about the implications of the technology we build and what is happening to people as we work our way higher and higher up the value chain, crowding those at the bottom either up into the next level or out of the employment market. As as we start to reach levels which are practically the limit for larger and larger amounts of people we can expect to see greater and greater unemployment unless we figure out a way to grapple with these repercussions.