Almost every culture has their story of a man who is not a man, the tirelessly working golem that feels no pain and will do any task asked of it. The most recent incarnation is made of wire, circuits and metal, with a brain of silicone inscribed with ones and zeros and a heart powered by tame lightning.  This is, of course, the robot.

These days, robots are multiplying in both number and sophistication, giving them the capability to accomplish ever more complicated tasks. This new automation revolution—where factories once full of serious foremen and union laborers are now replaced by gleaming high tech machines to produce goods—threatens the employment of hundreds of thousands of people as bodies that require sleep, healthcare and food are replaced by machines that require only electricity and occasionally maintenance. China recently proved that machines can out-produce people in terms of both quality and quantity.  According to the Times of India, the world’s first completely automated factory in Dongguan City showed defects in products dropped from 25% with manual workers to under 5% with full automation, and quantity leapt up from around 8000 units per month to around 21,000 units per month. The company found it so successful, they plan to open many more factories of the same nature.

This replacement of human capability with mechanical muscle is easily comparable to the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, where the steam engine was originally decried as an instrument that would lead to mass unemployment for everyone in the manufacturing center and completely wreck the economy. With the benefit of hindsight, this idea seems silly, as the Industrial Revolution is largely responsible for the technological advances and massive leaps in productivity that allows many people to live a lifestyle that less than 500 years ago would have been nearly impossible even for kings. 

Despite the apparent silliness of decrying advancements in technology as bad, some today are still doing so. Both economists and laid-off workers are protesting the implementation of these technologies as doom for the economy and any type of manual labor, according to an Jul. 7, 2011 article in Fiscal Times. A large segment of the population believes these naysayers are the same as those who derided the steam engine as the economy’s certain doom. But the naysayers? They’re right.

Humans have three major assets to offer other humans in terms of the economy: muscle, brains and emotions. The muscle can be found in the most obviously replaceable jobs: basic manufacturing, agricultural work, mining and other physical labor. Emotions can be found in creative works, like works of literature, poems and even the humble newspaper. Brains are the human intelligence found in stuff like financial analysis, law practice and other white collar jobs. This brainpower is what is now within the machine’s power to replace and is why people should be worried about the new automated revolution. While emotional work still has its place, the replacement of both human muscle and brainpower by machines will create massive numbers of unemployed people, such that the  other sectors of the economy cannot handle the influx, especially as the ever-increasing sophistication of machines increases productivity per worker and thus reduces the demand for human labor in the emotions sector of the economy.

Human brainpower is present in far more than the basic white collar job, as it is human intelligence that allows us to, for instance, drive a car. It is the new machine capability to copy basic human intelligence, the new sophistication of machinery, that is a new component of this revolution, and the most dangerous.

The transportation industry is the perfect example of the dangers of this new revolution. Google’s self driving car is the herald of a new age. Transportation was, in the old Industrial Revolution, one of the first things to change, as the advent of the railroad changed the way that goods and people moved, replacing wagon trains and leading to a much more connected country. Now, the vast majority of goods in the U.S. are transported via trucks, all driven by a person. And when, or if, Google gets its car approved to be road safe, people will all, sooner or later, be out of a job. Automated trucks driving goods from place to place represents what will come to be a fundamental shift in the world economy as robots and machines come to replace not just human muscle, but also human brainpower. This is the major new component that makes the automation revolution different from the Industrial Revolution of old.

The case of the future of the transportation industry, while not technically yet up for grabs, seems rather clear cut: many will lose their jobs while the industry sees an increase in profits that will not translate into increased employment but rather will continue to line the pockets of people at the top and increase the wage gap.

A programmer friend of mine once told me that there is nothing on earth that cannot be improved with a computer program. When it comes to work and the economy, he’s right. Every aspect of human work, whether it falls under the category of brains, muscle or emotion can be improved by robots. However, the increase in sophistication that now allows robots to replace not just muscle power but also brainpower is the hallmark of this revolution. As such, automation will increase across all industries and will completely revolutionize any industry that is labor- intensive. 

Each one of these industries will have a flood of jobless people come out of it, looking for work and unable to afford many of life’s basic necessities. This is the nightmare scenario of the automated revolution and, according to many economists, has a good chance of coming to pass.