A lot of people have been worrying the technology is taking away jobs and suppressing wages. To a large extent these worries are compared to the Luddites and are dismissed as silly and misguided.
The economist reaction to these worries is basically "That's silly, this is how economic growth works. No one thinks it is bad that the horse driver and telegraph operator jobs have disappeared." Economists are right that old inefficient jobs need to be replaced in order for human society to grow richer over time. When technology satisfies one need, workers are free to take a job that satisfies another of the almost infinite desires that humans have. And when workers are more productive, the marginal productivity of a good worker often goes up proportionally and their wages increase.
But there is more to the "technology reduces wages" story than economists like to admit. The Luddites tried futilely to stop progress that benefited society, but the artisans themselves really did see their wages fall due to competition from technology.
The obvious way that technology reduces the wages of workers in the developed world is how it enables and facilitates competition from workers in the developing world. Arnold Kling has called this the Great Factor Price Normalization. In this scenario the average worker is significantly better off and society gains from trade, but workers in the developed world may see wage stagnation to pair with lower prices.
Arnold explains. "I want to suggest that there is a connection between this trend and the stagnation of median incomes in the United States, and even to the decade-long drop-off in employment here. New patterns of trade are developing that are reducing the advantage that a person enjoys merely for being located in the United States."
But there is a second way by which technology can suppress wages - when technology can guide and track workers the output of different workers becomes more uniform and thus more fungible. Before the era of ubiquitous cheap information technology, training and tracking the performance of mid and low skill workers was more expensive. Workers varied significantly in quality and ability and it made sense to pay workers with experience more so they would not have to be replaced by new workers who would be expensive to train. The extreme example of the fungible worker is the Amazon warehouse worker.
"The programs for our scanners are designed with the assumption that we disposable employees don't know what we're doing."
Amazon can quickly train employees as well as track them to make sure they are not underperforming. There is a smaller difference between one employee and their potential replacement. If an employee decides to leave their replacement is guided by technology that makes the new worker's productivity very close to that of a good worker.
Before these technological advancements, workers enjoyed mini-monopolies. The warehouse worker couldn't be easily replaced because their replacement might be way less efficient as they learned the layout of their workplace. As technology more directly guides low and mid skill workers in their jobs the workers are losing their mini-monopolies. Workers don't need job specific experience to be hired so the supply of workers available to every technology guided job has increased. A higher supply leads to a lower price (the price of a worker is their wage). After full employment is reached the general wage level may increase for low skilled workers, but for now the impact of the Great Factor Price Equalization and the More Fungible Worker are suppressing the wages of middle and lower class developed world workers.