Can We Make Today's Disruptions Benefit Us All?

Lately I've been thinking about how everything in life eventually disappears. One of my favorite homes while growing up in Sicily became a beachside restaurant. Another memory-packed home in Bolivia was turned into a car dealership. My grandparents' home, always a safe haven for love, was torn down to make room for an apartment building.

Schools, churches, neighborhood restaurants, friends, family, pets, traditions—so much of what once filled me up and grounded me in life has disappeared.

In one of my daily fields of endeavor, graphic design, I've noticed a similar phenomenon with long-standing lettering styles (otherwise known as fonts) disappearing. Used strategically, fonts can shape human responses by creating familiarity, trust, and even excitement. But, one of my go-to fonts has been discarded to make room for something trendier. Like everything else, I've had no say in the matter.

For some reason, disappearing fonts, homes, and favorite hangouts bring to mind disappearing people who are loaded into dumpsters that fly off to El Salvador or, now, South Sudan. It's not just because a small percentage of these so-called "undesirables" have broken laws. It goes far beyond what anyone is telling us.

Like rejected fonts that must go by the wayside, the disappearing immigrants who were once valued as cheap labor are now passé because there are novel replacements waiting in the wings to fill their jobs.

What are these incoming novelties? For the dirtiest of jobs, deals with for-profit prisons will be made, and American prisoners will soon be leased out, for instance, into meat processing plants to slaughter animals, slice up carcasses, or sanitize the kill floor—jobs only dark-skinned immigrants could tolerate before being deported. For cleaner jobs in service industries such as healthcare facilities or food prep factories, robots will step in to replace the newly unwanted.

The marvel of robots, in fact, will be shaping and driving our new economy since there are endless profits in both selling and leasing bots that can be programmed to do anything we can imagine.

But I wonder if we're ready for all the innovation that's coming. Have you met your future doctor yet? You know, the one that rolls in and bluntly says in its digitized voice, "Your diagnosis is stage 4 inoperable cancer." Is anyone ready to watch such a creature rotate around and roll back out of the room on its way to the next patient?

Lately, there's been a lot of disappointment among job seekers who've received interview requests by companies they've applied to. After dressing up to make the best impression, their interviewer turns out to be a bubbly AI bot named Robyn.

HR is expected to be one of the fastest growing sectors in the new economy. Why? Because bots will be busy firing human employees and hiring robots as replacements. In other words, humans will no longer factor into Human Resources. Once pie in the sky, bots are now trendy, but the trend is widely disruptive to human welfare. It dehumanizes the workforce to make companies more profitable.

Although jobs evolved throughout the centuries as machines performed labor cheaper and faster, this time it's different. Back in the day, if your office Xerox machine broke down, there was a human technician who earned a living by fixing it. But, today, there's a downloadable bot or string of code to fix just about any glitchy technology.

As we witness countless protests over the abrupt disappearance of democratic norms, no one seems to have their eyeballs on the more silent disruption of our disappearing workforce.

But some billionaires are exploring the need for a national income as the workforce continues to shrink. Without a monthly stipend, former employees won't be able to pay their bills, let alone shop— which stimulates the economy. A national income, of course, will be labeled socialism until someone can demonstrate how Wall Street can profit from it.

We've never been in this boat.

Unlike the transfer of wealth from our middle-class to the corporate class which began 45 years ago, this transfer of decent jobs to cheap bots is happening overnight through our intertwined global economy. And this is the real reason immigrants are being sent "home". The public purse, now whittled down to slim pickings that benefit the wealthiest Americans, is stretched too thin to also support unemployed immigrants.

So, humanity is the last thing I will say is disappearing, along with the dignity that keeps social structures intact.

How did we get here?

Americans are eager beavers, trend seekers, and early adopters of anything new that's shoved their way—if it's the latest, it must be the greatest. If we're not on trend, we're labeled laggards, or old. But by jumping on board to make way for everything new, we've suddenly made ourselves disposable, too.

Is there a way to make this transition benefit us all?

Maybe, but only if we can first recognize that the train has left the station without any of us or our loved ones on board. Only then might we have a passionate enough reason to deploy a counter-measure.

The Preamble to the Constitution promises to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Clearly, that's not close to what's happening here in the US.

Dehumanizing the workforce is a square peg trying to fit into the hole of our nation's promise. But, it's through these words where our hope for restitution lies.

More than anything else in our Constitution, the Preamble denotes the kind of society our founders called for. It imagines a secure, tranquil, and just lifestyle. Though it has never been fully achieved, I believe it still can be and feel there's an urgency to level up and focus our intention on this vision.

If we were to put the same fervor and energy into rising up in support of promoting our general Welfare as we are toward safeguarding democracy, we will establish a new benchmark that aims to secure our collective welfare, along with the blessing of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.