The only people who lost jobs were skilled craftsmen, who made up a tiny percent of the population anyway. And they weren't really lost, just replaced with lots of unskilled work.
Agriculture automation came years later, and the farmers weren't entirely screwed because they mostly still owned the land. If you own the robot that replaces you, you aren't necessarily worse off.
The coming technological revolution is entirely about automation. And not just automating skilled jobs, but most unskilled ones. A large percent of the population will be affected.
In most of the fields I've seen they've been replaced by Mexicans.
Just because you don't "see" the work humans currently do doesn't allow you to be ignorant to it happening. Just because you personally don't want to work (as most people) doesn't mean there isn't plenty out there for people to do.
Are housing prices, at least in the U.S. actually attached to the value of work, or they mostly affected by the banks willingness to hand out money?
Let's go another step and take work out of it completely. If houses were free, there would still be houses that are worth far more than others, simply because of proximity to other things of human interest.
That "a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary" means exactly nothing. The size of median salary is market driven, and the price of housing reflects the games banks and housing developers are playing, and thus can be arbitrarily high.
When people only think short-term (what's can I afford monthly) vs. long-term (what will I pay out over the life of the loan vs. what I'm getting now) they make mistakes. These mistakes are self-inflicted but these people tend to then blame any and all others for why they can't get ahead, why the system doesn't work, why the American dream is dead :).
The situation is different from the TVs and computers and cars because those are not considered as important as your own house. Most people eventually have to move out, so they have to participate in the game. I believe we call it "inelastic demand".
I'm on board with surfing all day while you maintain the robots to make my food. Is that cool with you?
What is an example of a non-government bullshit job?
You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing.
Over the last 150 years, the proportion of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from ~70% to ~2% [1]. They've literally been replaced by machines.
A large proportion of those people are now doing menial intellectual jobs that likely will be replaced by "AI". A complete shift in the nature of the work we do isn't unprecedented, and it shouldn't be considered impossible, but it shouldn't be considered disastrous either.
edit: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...