Robots have put half a million people out of work in the United States, and researchers estimate that bots could take 800 million jobs by 2030. But New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that widespread automation is an exciting proposition–as long as some kind of government safety net is in place to equitably help the people who are displaced. At the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, today, Ocasio-Cortez attributed widespread fear of robots taking jobs to the failure of underlying systems that should mitigate income inequality and economic precariousness. “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she says. “We should not feel nervous about the tollbooth collector not having to collect tolls. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited about it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die.”
