Nicely written[1] and not as hyperbolic as others but to buy in you have to get past this:

The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot—one in which the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end.

This paragraph does an interesting double switch and it is that switch that is important. It is demonstrably true that throughout history, displaced workers have cried the warning to other that soon, their jobs would be on the block and what would they do then? And through out history that doesn't happen. To understand why that doesn't happen you have to understand the causal relationship between work and spending.

People spend money, how they get that money to spend, whether it is waiting tables at a restaurant or Daddy's trust fund doesn't really matter, it gets spent for "goods and services" (which we'll just call goods). And other people figure out ways to provide desirable goods in order to attract someone to give them money in exchange for that. But no where in that transaction is there a specific "job" there is only money and goods.

Take for example blacksmiths and auto mechanics. In the 1850's there were lots of blacksmiths and perhaps a handful of auto mechanics. In the 1950's there were lots of auto mechanics and a handful of blacksmiths. So what happened? People started driving cars, stopped riding horses, they spent money to get goods and services for cars, stopped spending money to get goods and services related to horses or wagons.

Conceptually, people spent part of their money on transporting themselves and their stuff around. Other people provided goods and services around transportation technology in support of those people. As the technology for transportation evolved, people who provided goods for the previous technology found fewer and fewer customers, people who provided goods for the new technology found more and more customers. Net of everything else, same "number" of employed people, but the way in which they were employed changed.

They important bit is that not spending, that kills jobs for everyone, changing technology just moves around who can find employment and who can't but the number of jobs stays about the same.

The third vector is productivity, which is to say when it took 10 people to do X units of work toward producing a good or service, and now it only takes 1 person, that is a productivity gain. You can pay that one person[2] twice as much as any of the other 10 people and come out ahead. So more productive implementations win over less productive ones. But even with productivity gains, when you're now spending perhaps 20% for the same goods, you now have the 80% you are not spending on those goods available for still other goods and services. So 9 "jobs" get eliminated in one market and 9 more different jobs get created to supply the other stuff the now freed up money can be applied toward.

The key here is eliminating certain jobs does not lead to unemployment in the large, but eliminating spending does. You lose jobs in a recession because people spend less, you gain them back more slowly if technology change has created dislocations (like it did in the Steel Mills.) But if a robot takes away your current job, it doesn't mean there doesn't exist another job you could do.

So economics aside, there are very real social justice issues around retraining and making available resources when conditions cause problems, but the luddite view that there won't be any way to earn a living, or that we won't want to or have to, is not well supported by the evidence.

[1] Not something I often say of stories in the Atlantic

[2] Remember, it is money seeking goods not "jobs"