Except that there is a lot of hardship during the transition. Literal kids starving in the streets. The entire midwest is a testament to what happens when short sighted policy assumes systems are self healing. There are generational assets like well built factories and railroads that took immense capital and literally cost lives of willing and unwilling laborers to build that are just wasting away and returning to nature and for what? No everyone wants a manufacturing rebuild? How about we take all the capital wasted on SaaS and data centers and rebuild the factories in Akron, OH or Thomasville, NC. Instead we are giving billions to the uber founder so he can "launch the next industrial revolution".

Though a lot of that was a political choice to outsource to China and similar. We've had a lot of new tech since 1900 - cars, electric motors, internet, computers and the like and I'm not sure it's led to inevitable unemployment as opposed to people doing different jobs. The times there were mass unemployment like the great depression were more down to dumb economics and politics rather than tech.

Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.