In 19th-century England, craftsmen donned masks and rioted to force the destruction of textile machines that were stealing their jobs. The rebellion was crushed and the followers of Ludd - or Luddites - have come to be viewed as hapless rubes standing in the way of progress. But they had a point:

Automation causes unemployment.

The wave of automation now crashing onto the economy looks especially broad and powerful. Although its full impact is unclear, it could cause worker dislocation on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution, experts say. Eventually, technology creates more jobs than it takes away, they add. But in the short term, it's affecting more sectors of the labor market than in past eras of rapid technological change.

Technology's effect on job loss is "very significant," says Sandra Polaski, an economist and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "It's not just the same old thing that's been going on forever.... [It's] a very big pulse of new energy, of new ways of doing things."

Take industrial robots. Over the past 10 years, companies have spent some $100 billion installing them. Nearly 1 million are now on the job. The investment has proven spectacularly effective. The productivity of these machines has risen about 7 percent a year for the past decade.

But the human cost has been immense. Automation has eliminated some 10 million jobs, mostly in manufacturing, over the same time period. And the traditional advice to workers - join the computer-based "knowledge economy," or move to the service sector - looks suspect.

These havens aren't safe anymore. "Smart systems," computers that can do relatively routine tasks well, are beginning to gobble up jobs ranging from check-out clerks at Home Depot to airline ticket agents and hotel desk clerks - even to insurance underwriters and software customer support staff. "Machines are having greater success at things like writing software," says Harvey Cohen, president of Strategy Analytics, a research and consulting firm in Boston. "And yet 10 years ago, the government was advising people that the future was in areas like software."

Policymakers must focus on this shift and its impact on society, Mr. Cohen says. They have to figure out what steps are needed to mitigate its ill effects. In the long term, he argues, America in particular has more to fear from automation than the outsourcing of jobs overseas.

Cohen concedes that he can't back up his claims with solid numbers - yet. "We just don't have data yet on how [automation] will affect the job market over the next decade," he says. But a look at the recent past suggests a not-too-rosy future.

When the seven "Baby Bells" emerged from the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the companies embarked on a crash course of modernization from analog to digital technology. Over the past two decades, they also shed about half of their jobs. Today's phone companies use computer-controlled, highly automated systems that often diagnose and even repair themselves.

"One could argue that 300,000 to 400,000 jobs, some of the best the country has ever created, have disappeared from the telecommunications sector," Cohen says. "And the benefit we got was lower phone bills."

Similar trends are showing up in the service sector. "It's not unlike the industrialization that took place in manufacturing a century or so ago," says Uday Karmarkar, a professor of technology and management strategy at the University of California at Los Angeles. Businesses have found "you can shift many things to the customer. You can shift many things to a computer."

With the advent of e-mail, the letter-delivery business is going to disappear, he predicts. FedEx and the US Postal Service are "more and more in the small package business now. We'll see kiosks replacing people, whether it's at airline counters or anything else. We already have gasoline pumps that take credit cards. You'll see some replacement in grocery stores. Travel agents. Tellers in banks. People who do accounting services."

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