The point is, quite a few jobs and entire industries no longer exist as a result of automation. We can start throwing our shoes at the machines like during the industrial revolution, or we can enjoy the benefits they bring us, accept the growing pains, and adapt to the new world.
One big difference is that jobs lost during that time period were largely fungible with new opportunities, because none of those jobs required much in the way of training -- just work ethic and physical ability. Close one factory, open a new one, get people training on a new repetitive assembly line task.
One big difference with the automation revolution is that automation is going to completely eliminate all jobs that don't require training and education, because those are the jobs most easy to automate. We've already been suffering a lot since the 80s in America's transition towards a service economy, as cheap foreign labor and robots took away all the industrial jobs.
When even service jobs become automated, there will be nothing for the non-professional class to do except try to retrain before the next job gets automated. And that ignores the elephant in the room -- that many people who work unskilled or low-skilled jobs simply aren't willing or able to train for more skilled jobs, and those people will still have themselves and families to feed.
I agree with you that we shouldn't recoil in terror from automation and enter some kind strawman dystopia where all innovation must get vetted for release, but we need to be prepared for the implications of automation, and we need to consider whether or not our economy as it stands today is simply incompatible the coming technological shift -- and which is more important?