Not changed: Rent-seeking is good for people who collect, and bad for people who pay.
What's changed: automation creating value automatically, different from rent-seeking.
What's changed: automation creating value automatically, different from rent-seeking.
In today's inflation-targeting macroeconomic framework, automation causes a decrease in the price of goods and labour, which would have a deflationary impact. To prevent structural deflation, interest rates are reduced, which increases the value of assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.
So I think automation can also support rent-seeking, although more indirectly.
Nothing new. Industrialization in the 19th century was all about automation and created both poverty and inequality for factory workers.
This generalization is historically false. Please inform yourself.