&gt; Right. The usual counter is the following: &quot;This was predicted every time we had technological upheavals, and it never happened. Therefore it won&#x27;t happen this time either.&quot;<p>Which is, of course, false in its premise -- it happened with the technological developments which were happening alongside the development of the economic system which would become dominant in the developed world of the time, which would later be named &quot;capitalism&quot; by its critics, and was <i>mitigated</i> to a certain degree (but not, by any stretch of the imagination, <i>solved</i>) when capitalism was largely replaced in the developed world with modern &quot;mixed economies&quot; which limit the capitalist property system through the adoption of redistributive and socialized regulatory mechanisms while retaining the capitalist arrangement in outline (in the developed world, this approach has prevailed, for now, over both retaining -- or reverting to -- capitalism without compromising its structure and abandoning its property structure outright.)