You can forget about illegal aliens stealing American jobs when you have something far more sinister and seemingly out of this world facing America just around the corner. It’s something straight out of an Orwell novel or a page from Theodore Kaczynski’s Unabomber manifesto: an America that is slowly being consumed by robots doing more and more jobs that used to be done by humans, and it’s growing expeditiously. The process of automation is on pace to dominate the manufacturing and service industry in America and—eventually— the world economy.
This may seem a little theatrical, but is it really? I can’t seem to go to the grocery store anymore and find a human at a cash register to check me out. Instead, I face a sea of automatic checkout lines that allow me to pay for my groceries without meeting a single soul. The robot even tells me to have a good day and reminds me to take my receipt. Automation surrounds our lives more and more every day. We even have cars that drive themselves now.
During my lifetime, I’ve watched globalization destroy entire American cities, reducing them to absolute ruins. In addition to globalization, a tidal wave of automation will soon hit the world economy, driving down the cost of goods and services at the expense of millions of jobs. This will have widespread ramifications of catastrophic proportions throughout the entire world. This wave of automation has the potential to devastate the American economy.
Perhaps no other nation will suffer the burden of automation more than the U.S. This is due in large part to the fact that America hasn’t addressed the issue or devised a proper course of action for dealing with it, as the topic continues to be largely ignored by politicians, the media, and the general public.
Many financial experts believe the threat of automation is inevitable and has the potential to destroy our economy, our capitalist system, and our way of life.
The reason America will suffer the most from this potential tragedy is that the U.S. epitomizes capitalism, a governing structure that is doomed to fail when the crisis of widespread automation takes hold. It will cause millions of Americans to lose their jobs, and there are no new jobs to offer them. The rift between the rich and poor will grow astronomically, and tensions will rise to unprecedented levels across the U.S.
Capitalism in America has led to monumental successes as well as catastrophic failures. The rise of automation in America could mean the demise of capitalism in the country, as it will cause the economy to collapse in on itself, and there is no plan in place for recovery or survival.
If that happens, blood will be on the hands of the avaricious American capitalists and greedy politicians who enabled them to thrive at the expense of the betterment of the American people. America’s new president will take office in just a matter of days. President-elect Donald Trump won on a platform of bringing back American manufacturing jobs and making America great again, so why doesn’t he ever tweet about the threat of automation to American jobs?
What we are facing is inevitable; there should be no debate on that fact. This isn’t a topic like global warming, where people argue whether or not climate change is real. The threat of automation is undoubtedly real.
The political discussion shouldn’t focus only on the re-shoring of American manufacturing jobs but should also address what we’re going to do when robots start taking millions of American jobs. Now that’s a discussion that will hopefully lead to making America great again.
Everyone deserves the opportunity to work hard for a living. The modern tragedy is that not everyone who wants to work will be able to find work, and that’s when the American dream slowly begins to fade away. It sounds ominous, but until we face this problem the greater tragedy looms before us all: today’s workers are slowly being replaced by next-generation robots.
