Ancient Romans? They never had such labor saving devices and thus relied heavily on slavery for most manual labor. I imagine if they had the combustion engine things would have turned out very differently.

> What makes you think today's executives haven't taken enough humanities courses?

Not OP but i would have to guess something along the lines of a revolution of the non-ascended. IE: when you have a country where the 0.1% live a life of luxury and extravagance while the rest are left to fight over the scraps.

It was arrogance combined with a metaphysical shift away from rulers as the divine that lead to their downfall. The difference now is nobody even pretends to believe our elites are divine in any sense of the word.

As the MASSIVE aquaducts in France and Italy clearly illustrate, as well as things like the Thermae, the Romans were keenly aware that there are things that can't be done with any amount of slave labour, and did in fact use labor saving devices.

Hell, they had the same problem we have: "automation" (massive infrastructure projects) putting people out of jobs. The solution was also similar: first, massive infrastructure projects soaking up more than all available labor for decades, followed by making the problem worse, then austerity and mass-corruption on all levels, then (let's say "todo" in our current case) revolution, followed by large scale Rome-initiated expansion wars. On the plus side: those wars resulted in the longest period of prosperity in history.

> How is this different from other times in history?

The push for human fungibility on the same level as monetary fungibility is a much more recent trend, perhaps only setting aside slave societies.

Not sure I understand the scope of your statement in terms of time scale and the groups impacted.

If you mean "people having less agency in the workplace than 50 years ago in European/ex-European colonial countries" - sure, I buy it as a recent trend.

If you mean people in power treating other humans like farm animals or worse - this is not new at all and has been going on in various, far more brutal ways for as long as we have recorded history.