One more thing about people losing jobs to technology: you can thank (or blame) the politicians. They’re who made it a crime to pay people according to the value of what they produce. Unless that value was as high as the politicians wished it was. The “minimum wage”, in other words.

The minimum wage was originally conceived toward the end of the 19th century by the Progressive (left-wing) movement as a way to drive “undesirables” (blacks, Italians, Spaniards, Irish, etc.) out of the workforce so they could be rounded up and starved or sterilized (eugenics was mainstream science at that time.) But instead of saving jobs for the preferred Anglo-Saxons, the laws spurred creative people to develop technology like steam shovels and railroads that threw out a ton of low-productivity jobs and got people canned regardless of their race.

(For background on this, see Journal of Economic Perspectives — Volume 19, Number 4 — Fall 2005 — Pages 207–224, “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era”, by Thomas C. Leonard)

Fast forward to the present, and the same political and economic forces are still at work. Except now instead of planning to kill or sterilize the undesirables, the politicians have discovered the value of making them slaves of the State … grateful serfs who accept whatever grace the politicians dole out and (here comes the important part) who elect them regardless of their lies or crimes.