The fear is, like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, that change will suddenly spring forward at a rate that society can’t adapt fast enough.

And people are unemployed, or worse they are employed but at a rate they can’t afford to live, so are one of the tens of thousands of homeless in LA alone. They work 18 hours a day 7 days a week, so are dangerous as they drive to their third job at 3 in the morning which causes a crash which means massive traffic problems all day.

Even if you are a cold blooded Victorian thetr are benefits to keeping your customers alive and with enough free time to buy the crap you peddle.

There is a notion in economics of complements and replacements. The plow was a complement to horse labour, while the gas engine was a replacement. The former increased demand for horses while the latter basicly eliminated it. If we truly had human-level AI, labour models predict human wages would decline below subsistence. However, applying these labour models in a regime where we have AGI makes little sense, as all that will matter for human welfare is the objective functions of the AIs.