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At almost any point in time since the industrial Revolution, a person could say, “40 years ago certain people could survive and succeed in the economy and now they could not.” However, while it may be painful for some, the market always corrects and there are net gains.

And yes, things have changed. Forty years ago there were working class neighborhoods with high rates of home ownership and now not many such communities exist.

I grew up in what was a working class neighborhood. My neighbors owned their home, had five kids, all in Catholic School and the father delivered newspapers and the mother was a checker at a grocery store.

That would be impossible today.

Again, past tech revolutions created millions of good middle class jobs for low/average IQ people in addition to high IQ people. You could re-train people since the skills needed weren't that complicated. You can't take a cashier or an assembly line worker that's job has just been eliminated due to automation and "retrain them" as a robotics engineer or a SQL programmer - they simply don't have the intelligence for it. Second, past waves of tech created new industries (cars vs horse carriage). With robots, you aren't creating a new industry really - just replacing the labor that needs to occur with even cheaper labor (robots) - sure this creates very high IQ jobs to design and maintain the robots but doesn't help joe six pack much.

Once robots and automation started eliminated massive numbers of jobs that you need a full standard deviation above the norm from to be employed today, people like you and I will feel some pain - fortunately for us that's probably long after we're done working. But in the meantime, wage pressure for the bottom 50% is likely occur massively over the next 30 years and moderately for the next 25%. A UBI is the only real solution to the problem long term - but it is a long term problem that can be addressed later. Halting/reversing illegal immigration and adding a border tax would probably delay by 10, 15 years this impact in the US.