It seems likely to me that for today, the mass unemployment is more likely a result of failures in the economic policy arena. Automation simply hasn't advanced far enough yet, there are still far too many human-only jobs for the technology argument to fly. We don't really need wild explanations to explain where we are today, rather simple business cycle theory can take a pretty good run at explaining it. (I even saw people using business cycle theory to predict it in advance, including the fact that we've still got years of a down economy to go through yet.)

I really don't expect mass unemployment due to technology to be a problem until we get a lot more jobs disappearing to robotics. When you see a purely-robotic McDonalds, start wondering.