Robots Are Coming for Factory Jobs — and No One Voted on It

I’ve been watching robots fall over for a long time.


About a decade ago, I stood on a Florida speedway covering a DARPA robotics competition where machines failed spectacularly at things like opening doors and climbing stairs. It was funny, a little sad, and a reminder of just how hard it is to automate human behavior.


Fast-forward to CES this week, and the joke’s over.





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Humanoid robots are no longer pitching sideways into the dirt. They’re lifting, carrying, improvising, and — according to companies like Hyundai (https://www.reuters.com/business/auto...) — heading onto American factory floors by 2028. These machines aren’t just pre-programmed arms anymore. Thanks to AI, they can understand general instructions, adapt on the fly, and perform tasks that once required human judgment.


The pitch from executives like Hyundai’s CEO (  / urn:li:activity:7414312626173886466  ) is reassuring: robots won’t replace humans, they’ll “work for humans.” They’ll handle the dangerous, repetitive jobs so people can move into higher-skilled roles.


Labor unions hear something else (https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/a-fi...) entirely.


For many workers, especially in manufacturing, these are some of the last stable, well-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. And no one is voting on whether those jobs disappear. There’s no democratic process weighing the tradeoffs. We’re just sliding, quietly, toward a future where efficiency outruns consent.


What troubles me most isn’t the technology itself. It’s the assumption baked into it — that if people are being worked like robots, the solution isn’t to make work more humane, but to replace the people.


That’s not inevitability. That’s a choice. And right now, it’s being made without us.


Jake Guest-Hosts “Tech News Weekly”


The nice folks at This Week in Tech, who have brought me on regularly for a year or so now, asked me to fill in for Mikah Sargent, host of Tech News Weekly, and I got to enjoy a turn in the anchor’s chair just before the holidays. Have a look!


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