The fear is precisely that the "relief" is not temporary - that the jobs these people used to have are gone for good, and won't be replaced by equivalent full-time opportunities. So economic insecurity becomes a permanent thing for a (large) class of people.

I was explaining this to my kids last night.

They know what current experimental robots can do. I asked them to imagine what a supermarket would look like when we have good physical automation to match the information automation. The cashiers up front have already been replaced by self-scan checkouts and a single supervisor. The stocking can be done by a robot forklift about the size of a human... so can the unloading of trucks. The trucks will be driven by software. There's really no need to keep anything except fresh produce out on display in bulk; keep one sample item on the shelves and when a shopper selects it, load it on to a cart in the back. That makes the supermarket much smaller: a warehouse, a display area, and the fresh produce area. If there's an in-store bakery, it's half automated already. The jobs for thirty to fifty people become jobs for five to ten people...

Then I asked my kids what sort of jobs people would have after that. They came up with pretty good ideas: programming robots, designing robots, and repairing them. They asked if there would be jobs for paleontologists, and I suggested that the auxiliary jobs would go away. Would a robot drive the truck? Yes. They offered that a robot with seismic sensors and ground radar would do the initial searching, and maybe there would be specialized digging robots that could be both faster and more careful than a human.

So, yeah. We won't have as many jobs in the future, so either our standards are going to have to rise and our expectations that people are defined by their jobs will have to be replaced.

You can push the supermarket thought exercise further and maybe bricks and mortar stores go away all together and we end up with some kind of Webvan / Amazon Fresh service delivered by autonomous vehicles. Those vehicles would be dispatched from autonomous distribution centers, and goods would be created in autonomous factories or picked in fields by autonomous workers.

If you think of people as essentially automatons (well, maybe highly capable meat robots), the only thing really different than the way distribution works today is we still go to the supermarket. If someone can crack the online grocery shopping experience nut, there's no reason why that couldn't change.

To that, I have to ask if we are all headed to a Wall-E future.

With high employment and high labor participation force you'd expect service providers to drop out of sharing economy in favor of a salaried job, with benefits and all.

So "temporary relief" is probably more appropriate.