It appears to me that this time isn't any different. Each major advance in automation has pushed the workforce increasingly into job categories with lower marginal productivity.

When an automation breakthrough occurs a small portion of the population gets better jobs and the rest get absorbed into low productivity/wage jobs. So far the resulting economic growth has meant that these people were still able to afford the neccesities, but sometimes this requires Malthusian forces to kick in and cause massive misery until it is so.

Right now, talk about it revolves around the transformation into service and knowledge economies and the increasing prevalence of bullshit jobs, but each successive wave of automation makes the problem worse. Combine this with the fact that our modern automation advances seem to only be increaing productivity marginally and the overall growth of the economy seems to be slowing down and you've got a recipe for disaster.