> While this is true, I think it’s a better assumption than “this time, we’re just too stupid to change and sit here and starve to death.”
I don't think so, for a few good reasons:
1. Making the "everything will be fine" assumption discourages taking proactive steps (e.g. if buggy-whip making is going away, It'd be better to retrain the buggy-whip makers 5-10 years beforehand they become redundant, rather than letting their businesses fail and letting them die penniless and forgotten).
2. This time may be different. There's a lot of hype going on about AI, but if even a little of that is true, it's going to put insoluble squeeze on a lot of workers (e.g. their job gets automated away along with most of the other ones they were supposed to pivot into).
3. You talk about "humans" in the abstract, but what about the seven billion people who are actually out there? You abstraction is a rug that can hide a lot of actual damage. To give an extreme example: what if "humans figuring it out" means two million tech billionaires living in an automated paradise on top of seven billion skeletons of workers they no longer need? "Humans" made it through a lot of things, while lots of individual humans were immiserated an/or died.
> There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?
Yeah, happy endings like "the rust belt."
