The displaced workers went on to do other things. In the last 100 years for those very workers who "lost" their jobs to mechanization the overall standard of life for ALL american no matter how you measure it it better. There's fewer people living in poverty, people live longer lives, better infrastructure, and no widespread famine in the US I am aware of.

The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck is largely about this concept. If these social transitions were as rosy as you paint them I think the book would be called Grapes of Pleasant Improvements in Living Standards.

Is this the Sillicon Valley version of “they went to a farm upstate”?

Go and actually look at the outcomes of the people that lived through the great depression or the many many bank runs that preceded it.

(or anything to do with the displacement of peasant to the towns)

How many of those works displaced survived the winter? You know they lost their homes as well right? Those dustbowlers, how were their life chances?

Sure new jobs were created, and the mechanisation boom that stared in the 40s and lasted through to the 70s was _brilliant_

But thats not going to happen again with AI, where are the jobs going to come from, much less decent paying ones.