Labor also has more protections in these other developed countries, making it harder to fire workers when more efficient manufacturing processes are developed; in fact, labor contracts in Japan have traditionally banned laying off workers displaced by automation. In the 1980s, economists credited these contract provisions with helping make Japanese manufacturing so productive, since workers had an incentive to suggest efficiency improvements.

In hindsight, historical fears of technological change look foolish, given that automation has increased living standards and rendered our workweeks both safer and shorter. In 1900, when nearly half the American labor force was employed in backbreaking agriculture, the typical worker logged 2,300 hours a year, according to Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University. Today that number is 1,800. (If you believe “The Jetsons,” by 2062 we’ll be working only two hours a week; Keynes had similar forecasts.)

That said, creative destruction is undoubtedly painful. Historically, the children of displaced workers have benefited from mechanization, but the displaced workers themselves have often been permanently passé.

“Every invention ever made caused some people to lose jobs,” says Mr. Mokyr. “In a good society, when this happens, they put you out to pasture and give you a golf club and a condo in Florida. In a bad society, they put you on the dole, so you have just enough not to starve, but that’s about it.”

And many economists today believe the transition will be even more difficult this time around.

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at M.I.T. and co-author of the book “Race Against the Machine,” argues that we have reached a sort of inflection point in productivity growth. It took expensive capital equipment to revolutionize farming and manufacturing; the marginal cost of the technologies (software and so on) producing the most recent gains in efficiency is near zero. Any job that can be reduced to an algorithm will be, leading to the displacement of workers in industries as diverse as retail and radiology.

That’s not to say there will be no new jobs to fill the void: we can scarcely imagine the industries and occupations that will flower as the economy adjusts, just as prior deep thinkers could not have conceived of today’s nanophysicists or social media consultants. The challenge, of course, is training or retraining workers quickly enough to take on new, higher-skilled roles.