I feel like this story was also run in 1920 with the invention of the steam-shovel. There was once a time when ditches were dug by hand, and the steam-shovel displaced thousands of jobs.
This was a major fear at the time -- look at some of the popular literature that's survived: The story of John Henry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore) ) is nothing more than a fight between man and machine.
Technology always displaces labor. There might be some new or interesting reason why this time is different, but the concept is not new.
As a society, weather we consciously realize it or not, we use progress not as a way to work less but to think less. Example: the expiry dates on milk and stuff. Instead of letting people decide for themselves when the product goes bad we tell them the exact date that it goes bad. More quick examples? Here: Calculators, Fancy medical instruments, air guitars, spell checkers etc. All of these deaden our sense of observation and awareness and dull our minds.
So we have a choice: Do we make an effort to train our brains our do we let our technology do all the thinking for us? Well, why go through all the effort to train our brains when we don't have to?
What requires more thought, farming or computer programming? coal mining or accounting? I would argue that today we engage our minds more than any other society before us.
"The questions that we are raising here are profound. How do we prevent this downward spiral from happening? Are we smart enough to see the robotic revolution that is coming and plan for it prior to the crisis? Can we redesign the economy so that we enter the new era of robots smoothly? With robots doing most of the work, can we actually create a society that takes advantage of the leisure that robots can provide? Or will the tens of millions of people displaced by the robots end up being homeless and destitute, living in government welfare dormatories?"
This isn't all that different from the transition from a manufacturing economy to an information economy that's been going on for a long time. It hurt the economy a hell of a lot worse to lose middle class manufacturing job than it's going to hurt losing lowest-common-denominator fast food jobs, which are the jobs at the most risk.
The more a job requires actual judgement, the less at risk it is. And indeed, I expect there will be plenty of supervision and maintenance jobs in the workplaces that transition to automation -- people will be much better at exception handling than machine systems for the foreseeable future.
Especially a future filled with robots caring for old people. As I understand it, Japan's declining birth rate has been part of the zeitgeist for a while now. I recall there was an feature-length anime film in the early 90s -- "Roujin Z" -- about an experimental robotic hospital bed that is developed because there aren't enough nurses.
This was a major fear at the time -- look at some of the popular literature that's survived: The story of John Henry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore) ) is nothing more than a fight between man and machine.
Technology always displaces labor. There might be some new or interesting reason why this time is different, but the concept is not new.