You are both right.
The first wave started with the steam engine and fossil fuels. Once we had a cheap, non animal or human source of energy, a lot of things were possible. It also dislocated much of the population in ways we haven’t adjusted to you. I grew up on a farm, and what my father farmed couldn’t support you now, and he farmed in an area covered by four small farms when he was a kid. That alone is 20 people who were no longer needed to do the job.
Industry is the same. The factory that needed 200 people to make a widget now only needs 50. The problem is that we still have the same or larger amounts of people who only have the ability to work in low skilled labor. We need to have something for them to do, beside eat on the dole.
One upcoming form of this is "large-scale 3D printing", to wit: rather than hiring a bunch of individually cheap workers to assemble a small building, a business can haul in a clever machine which can "print" the main structure with concrete, operated by just a few skilled workers. Example
The nature of human progress is to build a business serving a new need, satisfy that need, and to reduce the resources needed (human and otherwise) to produce it.