> Two big ifs: the central bank is competent and enough and people find new jobs.

That's only one 'if'. Well, the second 'people finding jobs' is a given if you have a half-way competent central bank and a regulations even slightly less insane than South Africa's.

But let's worry about technological unemployment once we actually see it. So far it has been elusive. (Even in South Africa, it's not technology but their own boneheaded policies that drive the sky high unemployment. They ain't technically more advanced than the rest of the world.)

You'd think so, yes. But outside of wars, recessions caused by 'real' factors are surprisingly rare. They are almost all caused by central bank 'nominal' incompetence. (I'm using 'nominal' and 'real' here in the sense of 'to do with the number of zeros on your banknotes' vs 'actual goods and services and other real stuff in the economy'.)

One rare counter-example was perhaps Covid, where we had a real issue cause a recession.

That's not to say that real issues don't cause problems. Far from it! They just don't cause a recession, if the central bank is alert. The prototypical example is perhaps the UK economy after the Brexit referendum in 2016:

The leave vote winning was a shock to the British economy, but the Bank of England wisely let the Pound exchange rate take the hit, instead of tanking the economy trying to defend the exchange rate. As a result, British GDP (as eg measured in Euro) immediately shrank by a few percent and the expected path of future real GDP also shrank; but crucially: there was no recession nor its associated surge in unemployment.

For another example have a look at Russia in the last few years. Thanks to the very competent hands of Elvira Nabiullina at the Bank of Russia, the Russian economy has perhaps been creaking under the strain of war and sanctions but has not slid into recession.

Summary: real issue cause problems for the economy, but they don't have to cause a recession, if the central bank is alert. (That's in economies with a central bank. Central banks are actually more of an arsonist than a fire fighter here.)