the people of the past were too optimistic for the future where computers would enhance all of our lives. computers can now steal labor and lie to you at maximum efficiency
saw it coming and couldn't do shit to stop it and had too much of a moral center to profit from it
Yeah when the iPhone became hyper-popular and Facebook became hyper-popular, everyone online (especially politically-aware people and open-source people) was like "this is gonna get bad"
We were completely right, it got bad.
"Remember when we looked forward to the days when machines would do all the work?"
"And here we are!"
"Yeah... Now remind me why we expected to get paid?"
The automation would need to be successful for this to be a monkey's paw scenario. Instead, machines do shoddy incomprehensible work, and startup founders fleece investors by pretending that machines are "doing all the work".