The difference is the pace and the scale. When its not just hand-weavers, but large swaths of society being made obsolete in a matter of years, we can't expect it to play out the same way as in the past.
What do you propose? We cannot stop it, nor should we even try to. The best you can do is to be aware of what is happening, and surf the wave rather than get creamed by it. Some people are going to come out poorly, but that is just the nature of the beast that is life. Don't waste calories worrying about them.
I don't think we should try to stop it. But I think the process of transitioning our society will be extremely painful. We can help mitigate a disaster by planning for it. It begins by first accepting that there will likely be huge social unrest as the process unfolds.
As automation takes over, there will be huge segments of society unable to maintain their standard of living. We need to begin to rethink our ideas of ownership of wealth and resources.
I think it's wrong looking at this as a "disaster". There's nothing good about a natural disaster, while history has proven again and again that paradigm shifts, while also having a negative side effect in the short term, have a much larger positive effect in the long term.
Take a look in the mobile industry. Is Nokia crumbling down and laying off a lot of people? Is RIM doing the same? Both former leaders in this market. Yes they are, but wouldn't you agree that what has come out of this is much better for everyone?
People need to stop looking at "saving jobs" in a time like this. The focus should be on "creating jobs". Let the jobs that need to disappear in order to have progress, disappear. If you're arguing against that, then you're arguing against the very nature of progress and evolution, whether it's biological, economical or technological.
For example in a time of "economic crisis", which happens about every 10 years or so, you should let that crisis kill the inefficiencies in the system! And then focus on taking advantage of it to create new businesses that are much more efficient and can deal with the new conditions, and from that you'll also have more jobs.
The industrial revolution was effectively covering the whole society, making a host of jobs obsolete in a matter of years, not only hand weaving. The same happened for the second industrial revolution, or the "green revolution".
Previous revolutions didn't make people obsolete because it still required human labor to drive the increased production, and because the growth in productive capacity mostly equaled the growth in population and demand.
The automation revolution will be different because supply can suddenly outstrip demand by orders of magnitude. Wealth as we currently view it will essentially be limited by availability of natural resources rather than human productive capacity.
