Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" has a fascinating section in which he defends automation and reduction of labor costs via machinery and technology:

"There is also an absolute sense in which machines may be said to have enormously increased the number of jobs. The population of the world today is four times as great as in the middle of the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution had got well under way. Machines may be said to have given birth to this increased population; for without the machines, the world would not have been able to support it. Three out of every four of us, therefore, may be said to owe not only our jobs but our very lives to machines."

I wonder therefore, how he would view AI?