Some of them might even be judged as getting paid for a net negative effect to society...

Absolutely, I wasn't saying that farmers in pre-industrial America didn't contribute anything. My point was that once tech displaced the majority of their jobs, they didn't all just sit around and not do anything.

Technology freed up their labor from producing food and allowed them to produce things like automobiles, textiles and eventually computers. The idea that new tech will leave large parts of the population with absolutely nothing to do has been suggested before, but we still have no example of it actually happening, and in fact, far more examples of the reverse.

Easy to say from the vantage point of history. But folks starved, died when their livelihood disappeared.

http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...