Humanity’s struggle to adapt to technology is hardly new — it has been with us since at least the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. As early as 1936, for instance, Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” — his last silent film and one of the most iconic movies of all time — offered a commentary on the fate of humans in an age of industrialization, corporate greed and automation: In the film’s most famous sequence, Chaplin, playing the role of the “Little Tramp,” gets hired to work on an assembly line in a factory, where he quickly finds himself swallowed up by the gears of a massive machine.

I am the child of two parents who came to this country as refugees from Nazi Europe. I was raised with a sense of national pride that derived in part from the words of Emma Lazarus, engraved on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”