While I don’t believe technological unemployment is coming for all jobs in the near future, I certainly think the transition could increasingly gain steam (or electricity or what have you). Economist Robin Hansen doesn’t agree, believing there will be merely a gradual replacement of human labor by machinery, no different now in the AI era than it’s been for centuries. From “This Time Isn’t Different” at Overcoming Bias:

“In each boom many loudly declare high expectations and concern regarding rapid near-term progress in automation. ‘The machines are finally going to soon put everyone out of work!’ Which of course they don’t. We’ve instead seen a pretty slow & steady rate of humans displaced by machines on jobs.

Today we are in another such boom. For example, David Brooks recently parroted Kevin Kelley saying this time is different because now we have cheaper hardware, better algorithms, and more data. But those facts were also true in most of the previous booms; nothing has fundamentally changed! In truth, we remain a very long way from being able to automate all jobs, and we should expect the slow steady rate of job displacement to long continue.

One way to understand this is in terms of the distribution over human jobs of how good machines need to be to displace humans. If this parameter is distributed somewhat evenly over many orders of magnitude, then continued steady exponential progress in machine abilities should continue to translate into only slow incremental displacement of human jobs. Yes machines are vastly better than they were before, but they must get far more vastly better to displace most human workers.”