The other big difference is that US hourly wages peaked in the 1970s, and there are enough people experiencing the divergence between expectations of continued improvement and reality since then that its no longer a prediction of harms that might occur in the future, but an explanation of harms that are being experienced in the present.
This suggests that the current rise in fear will likely reverse long before it becomes any more of a problem than it was the previous many times. That's the point of the article.
What's your point? Why is it relevant to compare against whatever arbitrary definition of "human history" you chose? (Since the "civilization"? Since the Agricultural Revolution? Homo sapiens? Homo erectus?)
[1]: e.g. http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/robot-may-take-your-jo...
Also, in a way, I believe that supports his argument. Why is it that the world's population has tripled since 1950? It's not just because people are having more sex. It's because of the changes in technology in the past 200 years. ie innovations in agricultural, healthcare, and energy production. [0]
While I won't argue that technology remained stagnant before that, I will argue that technological growth was very very slow. I would argue that many places in the world looked very similar at 400AD and 1400AD (in a technological sense). But in the past ~200 years, we've broken through whatever cultural barrier was holding us back technologically, and as such, the world is a vastly different place than it was 200 years ago.
I disagree at least in part with the article, jobs have always been replaced by machines (as well as globalization, which I don't have time to get into). But just as the technological pace of the world has quickened, so has the pace of job loss.
What is different is that at the "middle" of industrialization, it would be normal for someone to lose the job, but possibly find a new job, especially in the service industries. (And thus we have post-industrialization). However, what I would argue is happening now is that it becomes more and more difficult (especially with ever more specialization in jobs)to lose one job, and then quickly replace it with another job. That's one of the difference between then and now. As the parent posted, once the service industry jobs have been automated away, and then "creative" jobs, what then? "Post-Creative Jobs?" (Seriously, if anyone can answer this for me, please let me know.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition (note: a number of people argue that there is also a stage 6)
Hi, my name is sgnelson, I'm a post-creative. I need a job.
I can imagine a future where the lucky few who still have jobs don't actually do any work. Instead, they speak "New COBOL", a debased imitation of natural language, to machine learning algorithms, convincing them to do the stuff that previous generations would have to do 'manually'. "Please make the shark fiercer", these job-holding people would say to the algorithm, before feeding it huge troves of data that would teach the machine basic concepts such as "shark" and "fierce".
Obviously, some media commenters would claim that programming has been rendered now obsolete by the rise of New COBOL, but in reality, these lucky few speaking 'New COBOL' are the new programmers of that era. In a world where algorithms eat the world, someone still has to babysit the algorithms.
(sorry, couldn't resist ;-)