The Robots Are Coming, And They Are Replacing Warehouse Workers And Fast Food EmployeesMichael Snyder Thanks to technology, the balance of power between employers and workers in this country is shifting dramatically in favor of the employers. These days, many employers are wondering why they are dealing with so many human worker headaches when they can just use technology to get the same tasks done instead. When you replace a human worker with a robot, you solve a whole bunch of problems. Robots never take a day off, they never get tired, they never get sick, they never complain, they never show up late, they never waste time on the Internet and they always do what you tell them to do. In addition, robotic technology has advanced to the point where it is actually cheaper to buy robots than it is to hire humans for a vast variety of different tasks. From the standpoint of societal efficiency, this is a good thing. But what happens when robots are able to do just about everything less expensively and more efficiently than humans can? Where will our jobs come from? And this is not something that is coming at some point in the future. This is already happening. According toCNN, there will be 10,000 robots working to fulfill customer orders in Amazon.com warehouses by the end of 2014 But what if everyone starts using these kinds of robots? What will that do to warehouse jobs? PC World has just done a report on a new warehouse robot known as UBR-1. This robot is intended to perform tasks normally done by human workers This little robot costs $50,000, and it can work all day and all night. It just needs a battery change every once in a while. The creators of this robot envision it performing a vast array of different tasks To many people this may sound very exciting. But what if a robot like that took your job? Would it be exciting then? Of course you cant outlaw robots. And you cant force companies to hire human workers. But we could potentially have major problems in our society as jobs at the low end of the wage scale quickly disappear. According toCNN, restaurants all over the nation are going to automated service, and a recent University of Oxford study concluded that there is a 92 percent chance that most fast food jobs will be automated in the coming years It is being projected that other types of jobswill soon be automated as well Could you imagine such a world? When self-driving vehicles take over, what will happen to the3.1 million Americans that drive trucks for a living? Our planet is changing at a pace that is almost inconceivable. Over the past decade, the big threat to our jobs has been workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. But now even those workers are having their jobs taken away by robots. For example, just check out what is happeningin China Perhaps you think that your job could never be affected because you do something that requires a human touch like caring for the elderly. Well, according toReuters, robots are moving into that arena as well And robots are even threatening extremely skilled professions such as doctors. For instance, just check out this excerpt from a Bloomberg article entitled Doctor Robot Will See You Shortly And this is just the beginning. In aprevious article, I discussed thegroundbreaking study by Dr. Carl Frey and Dr. Michael Osborne of Oxford University which came to the conclusion that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs could be automated within the next 20 years. 47 percent? That is crazy. What will the middle class do as their jobs are taken away? The world that we live in is becoming a radically different place than the one that we grew up in. The robots are coming, and they are going to take millions of our jobs. So what do you think of this robot invasion? Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below Related selfnews Post Articles: This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. 