Comment by ben_w

Disagree on the timeline of the past, agree that we need to figure out new structures and that this will hurt.

Pre-industrialisation, most labour was the peasantry, whose main contribution was growing enough crops to keep themselves healthy enough to be a useful bunch of conscripts.

Industrialisation created the conditions where labour became important, because the workers were no longer bound to an employer so if they all walked out and told their friends you were a bad boss, your expensive capital (machinery) went idle.

The third industrial revolution, AKA the Information Age, was when it (gradually, piece-by-piece) started to become possible to do "lights-out manufacturing" or "dark factories", so-named because you (sometimes) don't need lights if you have no human workers. This period also came with globalisation and offshoring, which muddied the waters somewhat.

When some task can be fully automated, the labour working on that task loses its power with the management, e.g. UK print workers lost their relevance to the creation of newspapers in the UK with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute

Lights-out manufacturing is the ultimate form of this, where all the humans are redundant.