Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism

What the Luddites could not achieve—limiting the machines’ onward march—has been achieved, at least sporadically, by market society’s Icarus moments,

Any god that grants this wish must be truly vengeful. Like Midas, whose wish that all he touched would turn into gold left him sad and lonely, unable to touch his beloved lest he kill them, profit-hungry employers find that automation has the opposite effect of the one they hope for: loss of profit and, worse still, a crisis that may well bankrupt them.

the robots that have replaced human workers do not spend money on the products that they help produce. This has the effect of reducing demand.

Remember the tale of Icarus? How he misused the wings his father, Daedalus, made for him from wax and feathers to escape from King Minos’s labyrinth? Eventually Icarus flew too close to the sun, melting the wax, and he plummeted into the Aegean Sea.
Market societies are prone to similar folly.

The stories we tell reveal a lot about us.

We might well conclude that the machines aren’t slaving away for our benefit; at times it even seems like we’re working furiously to maintain them.

At first, acquiring a new machine gave an entrepreneur an advantage over their competitors by increasing production per worker. But of course, as soon as every other entrepreneur did the same, that advantage was canceled out. Soon enough, a further technological innovation was obtained by one or two leading entrepreneurs and then eventually became the norm across the industry. Thanks to this endlessly self-perpetuating process, humankind has gradually gained a vast army of mechanical slaves,

To reduce prices, they tried perpetually to squeeze more products out of the same quantity of wage labor. If feats of mechanical engineering or technological inventions conferred an advantage in this struggle for survival, then they were swiftly adopted.

Shelley’s far-seeing novel reflected the anxiety of a sensitive writer about the effects that technology would have on society.

If the economy is the engine of society and debt is its fuel, then labor is the spark, the life-breathing force that animates that engine, while money is the lubricant without which that engine would seize up.