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Jiro comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong
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The key Hansonian concept is that replacing humans at tasks is still complementation because different tasks are complementary to each other, a la hot dogs and buns; I should perhaps edit OP to make this clearer. It is not obvious to me that craftspeople disemployed by looms would have considered their work to be unskilled, but as that particular industry was automated, people moved to other jobs in other industries and complementarity continued to dominate. Again the question is, what's different now? Is it that no human on the planet does any labor any more which could be called unskilled, that nobody cooks or launders or drives? Obviously not. But there are many plausible changes in regulation, taxes, phasing-out benefits, college credentialism, etc.
I'd pay $5/hour for someone to drive me almost anywhere if availability was coordinated by Uber, but not taxi prices. House cleaning and yard work is not possible for me to find at a price I'd currently pay ($150 can't pay someone to trim your trees, at least not well). I strongly suspect that things would have appeared otherwise to me in 1870, when maids etc. were far more common. This looks to me like a barrier-to-entry, regulatory-and-tax scenario, not "Darn it we're too rich and running out of things for labor to do!"
Unless you want to pin unemployment on changes in people's trustingness, there is nothing obvious about your stated fears of the IQ 70 kid which would have prohibited equal fear in 1920. More to the point, a change in this characteristic is not a change in automation. A few weeks of training may indeed be necessary - I'm sure I live in a high-IQ bubble but I try to be aware of this - but people managed to get jobs requiring a few weeks of training in 1920.
I would favor Basic Income, though I would favor zero taxes on the bottom 20% even more. But this has to do with my beliefs/model/worries about distribution of gains and negotiating power, more than a belief that unemployability due to machines outcompeting many humans at literally everything is the source of the Great Recession and possible Long Depression (though I'm not sure we can get properly stuck in a Long Depression while China, India et. al. are still growing).
In 1920 if that kid was caught doing something like masturbating with the laundry, and he got fired, he might starve to death. Also, even barring that, the fact that upper class people could do almost anything they want to lower class people could lead to serious sanctions (for instance, all his family could be fired as well, or he could be beaten up) that serves to deter such behavior.
You'd think that more severe punishment would have a correspondingly greater deterrent effect, but that doesn't seem to be the case. What matters much more than the severity of the punishment is its likelihood. Sure, you might starve in the streets if you get caught jacking off in some high-born lady's nether-garments -- if you get caught. And, let's be honest: you're probably not going to get caught, and if you get caught, you're probably not going to be reported to your employer.
In any case, all that talk of starvation is far-off, way in the future; the laundry is right here, and offers immediate gratification. IQ is pretty strongly correlated with the ability to delay gratification, and (though I don't have a citation for this) people seem to care about the future a lot less when they're horny.
Not treating starvation as important will lead to the 1920's person repeatedly doing such things until he gets unlucky, at which point he'll starve and he'll have selected himself out of existence. You can't just say that people will ignore deferred gratification under circumstances where ignoring deferred gratification will lead to not surviving--natural selection will ensure that the only ones remaining are the ones who don't ignore it.
Furthermore, starvation isn't such a remote threat for people who are on the edge of starvation anyway.
What evidence would get you to revise your thought that evolution via natural selection would work in such short time frames? (OK, now what about updating your evidence about starvation levels in the 1920s? Until 1929, almost no-one would have been starving, full employment was normal.)
I didn't use the word "evolution".
If servants who do stupid things starve, the only surviving servants will be the ones who don't do stupid things. This does not involve evolution; the servants are not passing the information down to another generation. It does however involve natural selection.
And there's no point in "updating evidence", unless you have some evidence that deals specifically with the case of lower class people who work as servants and routinely piss off their employers. Whether people in general starved is irrelevant.