When past generations imagined the best version of the future, it was one of leisure. Advertisements, cartoonists, and pulp novelists dared us to dream of a world where the spoils of industrial development were shared with all: robot butlers, transit by pneumatic tube, and more familiar tropes. These developments, it seemed, would make our lives more convenient, more secure, and — dare we say — more abundant.
Now in 2026, it’s clear that even the most modest utopian fantasies have been stolen by the wealthy. The rich have luxurious self-driving cars while the rest of us suffer with crumbling public transit. The rich treat housing as an asset, while the rest of us navigate algorithms meant to maximize rent extraction. The rich have elite private schools, while the rest of us content ourselves to teacher shortages and glitchy AI tutors.
Going forward, the disparity is likely to widen. Having established their giddy desire to automate white collar jobs, tech moguls are increasingly turning their attention toward the trades — jobs which were, rhetorically at least, seen as a safe haven against AI’s rising tide. Now, the boom in robotics and AI spending is driving fear that blue collar labor will be next on the chopping block.
“It’s a whole other challenge on top of the large language models,” Communications Workers of America Union assistant research director Dan Reynolds told Politico about the heightened threat of physical automation. “Having an automated system interacting with the real physical world is a separate… mountain to climb.”
As tech companies look to shoehorn AI software into robotic platforms, it can be difficult for labor organizers to separate actual threats from typical tech industry bluster. Either way, the rapid pace is alarming.
“Our concern right now is [AI robotics] is just moving too quickly, and so it makes it difficult to plan for how this is actually going to affect workers, and what employers are going to do,” David White, director of strategic resources at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, told Politico. “We are keeping an eye on that as much as we can.”
Labor leaders who spoke to Politico say they’re trying to elbow their way into the conversation as early as possible. As layoffs across the US job market only seem to increase, part of the challenge will be successfully anticipating productive developments in automated systems — easier said than done.
“We’ve been hearing for at least 15 years that we’re going to have driverless trucks next year,” International Brotherhood of Teamsters media coordinator Matt McQuaid told the outlet. “There’s a lot of overpromising and under delivering in the tech industry.”
Still, not having a union prepared to fight automation is a recipe for disaster. While today’s notoriously buggy AI may not actually be capable of replacing human workers, that hasn’t stopped executives from using it as an excuse to cut jobs anyway. If the last few years of AI development have made anything clear, it’s that the tech elite aren’t interested in sharing the future — they want it all to themselves.
More on automation: Experts Growing Worried About World in Which AI Takes Your Job and You Have No Way to Provide for Yourself
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