Comment by intuitionist

Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during the 1930s, when the Second Industrial Revolution really came for the masses (and helped catalyze a huge labor shift away from agricultural work—but didn’t put all former farmers out of jobs).