>if what you're really trying to model isn't that common.

Technology increases are quite common. Again, look at that GDP per capita chart I linked; the logarithmic growth of technology as measured by GDP per capita benefit has been both continual, and, importantly, very steady. It's surprisingly steady, all the way up to the end of the 20th century. To echo some of the articles that have been posted on HN recently, we are in a time of unprecedented growth and social change; but we always have been. It's not like something is magically different this time around just because the HN demographic is the one participating in it, and everyone is making smartphone apps instead of web 2.0 pages, or laying intercontinental fiber before that, and so on. Technological growth is gradual and smooth in aggregate, even if individual markets can be disrupted more noticeably, which is one of the prime reasons why the job market is able to keep unemployment as low as it has been for so long, and will continue to do so in the future.

The "data set" you're thinking of seems to be something along the lines of one data point being "the industrial revolution happened, and long-term unemployment levels didn't rise." But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how we know that technology has been increasing for hundreds of years, as measured by things like the GDP per capita chart I linked, something including hundreds and thousands of data points. That all comes down to a single check: despite hundreds of years of technological growth, which is growth just like we are experiencing now and will be in the future, is unemployment higher? No. Assembly lines were a paradigm shift, cars were a paradigm shift, the modern western office environment was a paradigm shift, computers were a paradigm shift, and the internet was a paradigm shift. The entire country was always unprepared in terms of skills to capitalize on those shifts, but the unemployment rate stayed low. Apparently, if people want and need jobs, jobs will come into existence. The law of supply and demand.

I really want to stress that there's nothing substantially different in terms of innovation currently, contrary to your argument. If nanotechnology makes physical manufacturing of products functionally costless, or if the singularity makes all decision-making and programming jobs irrelevant, then sure. But social media? Smartphones and tablets? Hardly. The skills required to do these things have existed for decades; the underlying technologies are very iterative, as technological progress usually is.

Technology levels can be measured in terms of GDP per capita, which can be followed back hundreds of years. Same with unemployment rates. But in the end, is the unemployment rate 50% or 75% right now because half of the workforce is simply unneeded or unskilled, or unable? No. Non-recessionary unemployment baselines are still around 5%. To say that this particular, incremental paradigm shift that we're currently experiencing of increasing virtualization of our lives is any different is to be mistaken into thinking that our current era is a special snowflake apart from all the others before it; and that your judgement of technological change being too much for the job market to handle is different than that of Thomas Malthus's two centuries earlier, or all those thousands of voices in between.

I want to note that I'm very optimistic about the future of technology. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the human era will be over by the end of the century. But I also recognize that Malthusian-spectrum arguments never pan out, no matter how unique this current era is supposed to be in comparison to all the previous unprecedentedly unique eras.

edit: and can I add that I would be quite happy to see some technological change so rapid and sudden that it would put something like 5-10% of our workers out of a job pseudo-permanently. That would mean that some tremendous benefit to the economy has suddenly descended from the heavens of innovation. But those kinds of things just don't happen in eras like our own--unemployment shocks are instead currently temporary (usually being fixed in less than a decade) and due to very non-technology reasons, like the housing bubble and credit crunch this past decade.