No one is arguing against technology or progress. But there is a legitimate issue here; our economic system currently punishes society for progress when it should reward it.
For instance, If automated driving becomes a viable technology, we have just eliminated most of the labour force in the trucking industry. This should be a good thing for society (we've freed up lots of time and labour, likely reduced error, increased efficiency, potentially even eliminated some accidents and saved lives, etc).
But in practice, self-driving trucks would be devastating to the nation. There's close to 1 million people in the US who drive trucks for a living -- it's literally the most common job in nearly every state. (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...). All of these people would be unemployed. Many would likely be shunted into minimum wage, poverty-level employment for the rest of their lives (whatever poverty-level employment is left by then -- those jobs are rapidly disappearing to automation too).
If we continue on our current course without changing something, it will eventually be impossible for companies to create value at all -- so many people will be so poor, that it will be impossible to sell anything to them. How highly can Candy Crush be valued in the future, when 99% of it's ad viewers have zero spending money? How much value can AirBnB capture if 99% of the population is too poor to travel?
The reply that "these people should all just start highly successful businesses" is a cop-out, in much the same way that telling a poor person to "just become a movie star" or "just become a pro basketball player" is. It's simply not possible for most people to do that, regardless of how hard they try. (Startups already have a 90%+ failure rate today. Adding 1 million otherwise untrained individuals won't help that figure). And it's grossly irresponsible of us as a society to shove people into poverty for failing to meet this wildly-unrealistic expectation.