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Making Humans Irrelevant

The robots are coming to take your job! Between self-service kiosks at fast-food restaurants and driverless Uber cars in Pittsburgh, more jobs are being automated out of the economy.

Conservative critics have been quick to blame minimum wage increases for the changing job landscape, but the cold reality is that mindless, repetitive tasks can be done more quickly, more accurately, more efficiently by computers than by humans. We're rapidly moving to an economy in which workers will have to provide some type of value that machines can't, or they won't be working much longer.

Someone, after all, must program those self-service kiosks and the GPS in those self-driving cars. Someone has to troubleshoot them and fix things when the screen freezes. Someone has to manufacture the precision electronics (although robots are gaining ground in those skills too.)

And, of course, someone will be needed to mow the lawns of the people who got rich designing the robots that took everyone's jobs.

What do you all think? Are we approaching the dawn of a golden era, or are our best years in the past? Will technology give us a bright future, or will the robots put our economy into a permanent recession?

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