The loom, the sewing machine, the steam engine, and going all the way back the the printing press. These machine did not replace workers, they added market expansion.
Except that they ALSO added new training requirements such that if you didn't learn how to use the machine, your hand labor would get squeezed out. The parallel to AI's effects is still valid.
During the war, my father worked in the shipbuilding industry (at the Andrew Higgins Company). They made two things of note - the LCVP landing boats and the Liberty ships. Dad was a loftsman on the Liberty ships, which in his case meant that he made full-scale paper templates of bulkheads and other boat structures that had to have holes cut into them, and used those templates to "chalk in" the lines where cutting had to occur - because they didn't have numerically controlled cutting tables at the time. When I started with my first real job after college (the Navy job was more than a dozen years away), that company had a division that built steel control consoles for ocean-going ships using digital control rather than pneumatic or hydraulic control lines - and THEY had the NC cutting tables to cut the time - and labor - in making hulking steel engine-room consoles.
Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, we reached the point in banking that there were not enough people in the world, trained or not, to do the amount of work done by bank clerks to keep bank accounts correctly balanced. We crossed the "clerking automation" threshold at that time. If you have ever seen
Bridge on the River Kwai you might remember Lieutenant Joyce, who joined the commando team going after the titular bridge. When he interviewed for the position, they asked him what he did before the war. He was a bank clerk who added columns of numbers that had been added by another clerk and would be added again by a third clerk - all in the name of assuring that the numbers were added properly. And that was his job each day... nothing else. Just hours of adding numbers by hand because in the time frame of the movie, computers were still entirely a military thing. The IBM 360 series of computers and their competitor's counter-offerings essentially saved banks from being unable to do business. But the bank clerks suddenly weren't in demand.
After WW II, demand for manufactured goods skyrocketed. It was a time of great prosperity, and there were jobs for a lot of soldiers coming home. But the manufacturers couldn't keep up with the demand. Unions put enough pressure on manufacturers that they sought alternatives - and found them. Robotic assembly lines simply meant that if you still wanted a job, you needed to know how to use the updated equipment.
The US space program had loads of the people who held the job of "computers" - essentially using an advanced mechanical adding machine - to do the math required for the calculation of trajectories and orbital parameters. As portrayed in the movie
Hidden Figures, when the IBM 7000-series computers came on board to do that particular kind of math, the women who held the former job of "computers" became computer programmers. They adapted and kept good jobs.
The point is that automation of ANY kind is needed to maintain levels of production, and human adaptability is needed for the worker's to survive. Because the only thing constant in the world is CHANGE. Adapt and thrive. Stagnate and become relegated to the economic trash heap. This isn't a political thing - it is an evolutionary thing.
You are fighting nature when you bemoan this trend. Good luck trying to stop it, because it's not nice to balk Mother Nature.
