Western nations, in general do a piss poor job with people in poverty, as we think ourselves beyond the problems of the third world, at least in the united states, its clearly not true - and dont have the right systems in place to allow folks to either fully participate in the low end of the market, or give them meaningful government assistance.
Business right now is frightfully capital intensive - and has a high barrier to entry (paperwork mostly), and in many places there are no jobs available - what is someone to do?
This is a deeply ignorant statement that renders invisible over 2 billion completely disenfranchised people in the third world. Just because you don't experience the consequences - while you gorge on the bounty of human progress somewhere amongst the top decile of our species - doesn't mean they aren't there.
In the past 150 years, the human race has made extraordinary progress, lifting billions out of poverty.
There are still many globally who are left out, and I am aware of that. But you can't argue against the widespread gains to humanity through improved technology.
Yes, it is. Do we miss those jobs? No, we don't, because we're so much wealthier when we can replace human labor with machine labor. That frees up humans to do higher-order tasks, improving our standard of living.
Yes, there are winners and losers with any change, but long-term we are far better off than we could have imagined at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.