Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte” that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of MIT engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. ... You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant's preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists, and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. Bored with your companions? Play games on the machine. When you're through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt e-mailed to you. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. ... Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.” 
 
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– Once upon a time, an average worker with average skills could expect an average lifestyle in America—but not anymore. "Today, average is officially over," writes Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Average people can't expect the lifestyle they used to enjoy, because "employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation, and cheap genius." The chief culprits, of course, are globalization—which allows companies like Apple to produce iPods more efficiently overseas—and technology, which always has and always will eliminate jobs. Consider for instance this Slate piece about an iPad-like device that threatens to destroy even a usually reliable service position like waiters. So how can we respond to the trend? Bolster education. Whatever change comes, "one thing we know for sure," Friedman argues, is that "the best jobs will require workers to … make themselves above average."