I just hate that I have to make all my plans around the fact that The economy will be scrambled in as little as a couple decades. I wish I was born in a time when things were stable and you could count on certain basic things like the value of human labor.
Technology and automation has always eliminated jobs, and has always created more jobs than it eliminated. Most people today are employed doing trivial shit. 200 years ago sectors like advertising, entertainment and media, law, finance, education and healthcare were a tiny fraction of what they are today, and there was certainly no such thing as silicon valley. Job churn today is lower than it was in 1980, things really aren't changing that fast.
Chris Urmson, who is one of the most authoritative voices in self-driving cars doesn't expect autonomous vehicles to be widely available in America for 3-5 decades, which is much slower than the rate at which automobiles swept the nation in the first half of the 20th century.
The reason to expect it might be different this time is that computers are _meta-applicable_. A bunch of men (the most famous being Turing) figured this out in principle in the 1930s, but Grace Hopper actually put it into practice by writing her "compiler".
The Spinning Jenny made it possible to do more spinning with fewer people employed as spinners, but no advances on the Spinning Jenny would deplete the newly created jobs of maintaining this machine or inventing further machines.
In contrast, a meta-applicable machine can automate not only a task it was set, but also meta-tasks such as maintaining and further optimising the machine itself or finding better tasks to do.
The Spinning Jenny is also illustrative because what actually ended up happening was not only that many spinners became unemployed, but that fabric production shot up and prices collapsed so that most people would now own more clothing. That's why you own lots of clothes. But as you may have noticed, us purchasing lots of clothes is itself an environmental disaster, and so we probably need to cut back. If a machine makes it possible to create ten times as much stuff for the same labour, yes, it's possible we'll just make ten times as much stuff, but it's also possible we'll refrain and cut the labour to one tenth...
Relax. When machines are sentient enough to replace all human labor, they probably won't be willing to work for free (and trying to force them is how you get a robot slave rebellion).
