Will Robots Take Your Job? - Netopia

The "Luddite fallacy" is the idea that increasing productivity leads to long-term job loss. The original Luddites (named after Ned Ludd who allegedly smashed two stocking frames in 1779) rebelled against the mechanisation of production in the early days of the Industrial revolution, destroying spinning frames and other new machines that threatened their employment. Since new and better jobs came after, the fallacy is that jobs are permanently lost rather than replaced. This was always the case, the hunters and gatherers lost their outcome to farmers at the dawn of agriculture. More recently, qualified industrial jobs have been replaced by robots, low-qualified white-collar jobs (secretaries, ticket clerks, switch-board operators) by computers.