The world is reverting back to slave labor

Throughout history many civilizations have used slaves for labor, to produce a product or provide a service basically. Over time labor has evolved in many parts of the world, wars were fought, laws passed, perspectives changed, etc. More people began producing products and providing services and in return received some type of compensation, either directly or through an employer.

I'm talking about a new kind of slavery, one that doesn't involve people. It's coming through technological advances and automation. Businesses exist to make profits and human labor is an expense that subtracts from profits, most businesses want to exist on the least amount of labor possible in order to produce their product or provide their service. It would be a corporation's dream to eliminate all human labor and they have people working on that very idea everyday.

Through automation and other technological advances businesses are developing a new type of slave workforce, one comprised of computers and machines. One that doesn't need rest, or lunch breaks, or overtime pay, or health insurance, or vacation/sick days, or maternity leave, or minimum wage, or etc. It's not hard to visualize a factory 50 years from now with no human workers out on the production floor, semi-trucks that drive themsleves, forklifts that load the trucks through their programming and sensors, no human input required. Instead of hundreds or thousands of production workers there would now just be a handful of managers, technicians and programmers.

I'm not ranting against technology, far from it, I think it is amazing. A negative impact of these advances however will be the need for less and less human labor. It's not just manufacturing either, imagine a fully automated fast food restaurant for instance with maybe one human manager, virtual banks with no physical locations, government services available online only like renewing your car registration, etc. Where will the balance be struck between human oversight and automated labor? We all know the profiteers will want as little human payroll as possible, it will be up to the people to elect politicians that can best serve the people.

I'm very interested to see how the workforce and society evolves. Maybe the governments will tax these automated businesses to a degree large enough to provide human citizens with a minimum standard of living. Maybe we'll all be wearing rags and scrounging through old landfills for bits of metal to sell to our new robot overlords I do believe one thing is certain, human labor will be a constantly endangered concept as society advances.