Robots were supposed to take our jobs. Instead, they're making them worse.

The robot revolution is always allegedly just around the corner. In the utopian vision, technology emancipates human labor from repetitive, mundane tasks, freeing us to be more productive and take on more fulfilling work. In the dystopian vision, robots come for everyone's jobs, put millions and millions of people out of work, and throw the economy into chaos. Such a warning was at the crux of Andrew Yang's ill-fated presidential campaign, helping propel his case for universal basic income that he argued would become necessary when automation left so many workers out. It's the argument many corporate executives make whenever there's a suggestion they might have to raise wages: $15 an hour will just mean machines taking your order at McDonald's instead of people, they say. But we often spend so much time talking about the potential for robots to take our jobs that we fail to look at how they are already changing them -- sometimes for the better, but sometimes not.