Exactly. Funny how most people seem to completely forget that little detail of recent history.

What matters is if there is anything to transition to.

A strong argument is made that the options for new jobs are rapidly diminishing, as automation eliminates jobs by skill level, while at the same time the economy is not giving people time to retrain (people most imperilled by automation are usually those living paycheck-to-paycheck). Those two things were not simultaneously true in the past.

> What matters is if there is anything to transition to.

There will always be something to transition to. It's not because we cannot imagine it that it means there is nothing ahead of us. Like 75% of the jobs people have nowadays did not exist 100 years ago, and nobody at that time could have imagined them.

Eventually, maybe. That still doesn't solve the immediate problem: jobs are beginning to disappear now, there's no replacement in sight, and the economy doesn't allow for the need to retrain mass amounts of people. This is a recipe for disaster (the bloody kind).

The massively disruptive translation that completely overthrew the existing social orders worldwide, allowing a few small European nations to conquer most of the world and force an unwanted drugs trade on what had, for several thousand years previously, been the world superpower? The transition which directly to the rise of both communism and capitalism as viable nation-scale forms of government?

Sure, humans will go on (unless we nuke outselves), but that doesn’t mean it will be easy or fun to live through if we just presume it’ll all be fine.

That's mainly because the rate of change is far greater. Will need to get used to it though.