There was a time when the only thing helping human labor to produce goods and foods, were various beasts of burden, but in the late 18th century, mankind began to make and to utilize machines, primarily powered by coal, of which these multitude of machines were able to help produce power in order to manufacture textile products, in addition to manufacturing machines specifically for agricultural and textiles, as well as tools to help extract more coal, and to aid in the creation of transportation systems such as railroads, of which, once the industrialists began to fully understand just how much vital production that could be achieved by utilizing new power sources as well as utilizing machines to help in the creation of products, previously done entirely by hand, the industrial revolution, literally changed the day-to-day conditions of western civilization.
This meant that societies changed from being primarily agricultural societies, into creating the need for cities, so as to have the economies of scale and efficiencies of labor, machinery, and transportation, working cohesively together, which in aggregate, made societies significantly richer than they ever had previously been before, so that the everyday products from food, to travel, to housing, to farming, to clothing, all became much cheaper and produced at unheard of scales. This, also, created the rise of the middle class, because products needed managers, sales people, infrastructure, logistics, and all the other things that make up an organization, creating a labor force that was able to assert itself through fits and starts to receiving reasonable accommodations and pay, in return by doing so, the manufacturers of such received a reliable and productive work force. So that, in effect, societies inexorably changed from being basically the noble class or its equivalency, along with a relatively small class of lawyers, clergy, doctors and such, with everyone else being day-to-day laborers or artisans, into the need for skilled laborers utilizing the machines so as to make products, maintain them, and to coordinate all this so that the entrepreneurs of the age could make good money.
This rise of the middle class during the industrial revolution, was not then, an anticipated event, or even necessarily a desirable thing, it was more part of a happenstance of the age, for the industrial revolution, was not really driven by a need or desire to uplift the human race as a whole, but fundamentally was built upon more profit, cheaper product, bigger scaling, better transportation, all so as to have a bigger market share, and the desire to make more money through the usage of machines, in lieu of human labor. What occurred, through the industrial revolution, however, was a change for the vast majority of laborers, from previously having to make their money solely through their physical labor into a new workforce, that utilized machines guided by the hand and mind of man so as to produce more product more efficiently than had ever been done before.
We now live in an age in which the sophistication of machines has grown so much, that these modern-day robotics, have become truly a force unto themselves, replacingoften times, scores of humans that were necessary for earlier versions of such machines and robots. Today's robots are so sophisticated, so precise, and so consistent, along with their ability to work 24/7, that this negates the necessity for a huge swath of blue collar workers to work alongside them, and are a clear and present danger for the necessity of the current infrastructure of white collar middle management, leaving basically only the requirement for laborers that are minimally skilled, or laborers of highly specialized skills, whereas the upper management of such, reap the monster share of enormous financial benefits from these robotics. Everyone else, (e.g.) the former middle class, which has had a tremendous run of good fortune, since the onset of the industrial revolution, are now trending towards dropping into subsistence levels, where their future are ones of lifetime indebtedness and of treading water, for the age of robotics needs them not.