The difference is that scribing was a limiting factor to new and expanded methods of communication. Removing this limit allowed industry to expand due to massive decreases in costs of communication and expansion into entirely new forms. A similar argument can be made for many of the usual purported counter examples against automation alarmism. Steam engines, combustion engines, trains, cars, highways, the internet, they all were massively reducing friction and transaction costs, thus opening up new forms of commerce which brought new kinds of jobs.
Automation is a different kind of beast. The promise of the automation revolution is not orders of magnitude increases in efficiency, its removing humans from the equation. A long haul truck doesn't get across the country and order of magnitude faster, it just gets there more cheaply without the constraints human involvement. This does create a market for self-driving trucks and the industries needed to support them. But they too can be automated. The potential for making human labor irrelevant to large chunks of the economy is real and shouldn't be hand-waved away.
It really is not different, and people of the time certainly made the same exact arguments against most of the inventions on your list. Whether it's caused by a cotton loom or an immigrant, there is something about having to learn how to do a new job that really sets people the wrong way.
The only difference is that we are getting closer to the same asymptote we have been approaching for centuries now, where human labor is less about supplying material property and more about providing human service. Sure, it is possible that within the next few decades all but the most highly skilled and educated workers will be displaced into a continuously growing service industry. A decent chunk of people are not cut out for making a living on human interaction, so this is where a base UBI makes a lot of sense. It does not, however, imply that the labor force as a whole will not have any work to do.
The difference is that scribing was a limiting factor to new and expanded methods of communication. Removing this limit allowed industry to expand due to massive decreases in costs of communication and expansion into entirely new forms. A similar argument can be made for many of the usual purported counter examples against automation alarmism. Steam engines, combustion engines, trains, cars, highways, the internet, they all were massively reducing friction and transaction costs, thus opening up new forms of commerce which brought new kinds of jobs.
Automation is a different kind of beast. The promise of the automation revolution is not orders of magnitude increases in efficiency, its removing humans from the equation. A long haul truck doesn't get across the country and order of magnitude faster, it just gets there more cheaply without the constraints human involvement. This does create a market for self-driving trucks and the industries needed to support them. But they too can be automated. The potential for making human labor irrelevant to large chunks of the economy is real and shouldn't be hand-waved away.