The job displacement coming is from robots, not immigrants

The job displacement coming is from robots, not immigrants

In a factory in China, one production line assembles a mobile phone every second, without a single human operator, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is not science fiction: it is the 'dark factory' model that already works and which giants like Amazon, Xiaomi, and others plan to replicate. While public debate focuses on immigration as a supposed labor threat, the data points in another direction: the true replacement is technological, and its scale involves hundreds of millions of jobs over the next decade.

The numbers already on the table

The estimates circulating are conclusive. Artificial intelligence can already replace nearly 12% of workers in the United States, according to an analysis published by El Español. On a global scale, up to 300 million jobs could disappear in the next ten years. Morgan Stanley detects a net decline of 4% in key sectors, with particular incidence in the United Kingdom and automotive industry. In Spain, a Funcas study warns that AI threatens to destroy 40,000 jobs in banking over the next decade, up to 25% of staff in institutions. And the McKinsey & Company report goes further: 60% of working hours in Spain are automatable, while the demand for AI has quadrupled.

The myth of the irreplaceable programmer

One sector that resists the idea of its own extinction the most is software developers. The logic is understandable: if AI programs, who trains it? But the reality is that the tool they use today as a co-pilot is learning from them, and from hundreds of thousands of programmers worldwide. Those who have tested it to generate scripts maintain that in seconds, it produces what previously took weeks of work. The uncomfortable conclusion is that programmers could be among the first to fall, not the last.

The argument that AI will remain forever as an assistant is, at this point, a matter of faith.

The consumption problem: robots don't buy houses

There is a paradox that few economic analyses address frankly: if automation eliminates jobs and wages, who will buy what the machines produce? Robots do not rent housing, they do not take out mortgages, they do not go on vacation, nor do they pay for Airbnb. Rental property income, which has been the big business of recent decades in Spain, faces a future without solvent tenants. The bubble of rents and housing could collapse not due to a financial crisis, but due to the disappearance of demand. It is a scenario some analysts describe as 'a society by castes and everything rationed,' where a minority with capital controls production, and the rest survives on aid.

The political response: distribution or chaos

The history offers an uncomfortable precedent. Henry Ford understood that his workers needed to earn enough to buy the cars they produced. Today, the question is whether technology owners will learn that lesson or if they will prefer a model of rampant misery, like the one described in the film Elysium. Some maintain that AI is being used primarily to scare workers into accepting worse working conditions, and that the real problem is not technology but greed. Others, more skeptical, believe that automation is incompatible with human life as we know it, and that in less than two decades, the question will not be how much unemployment there is, but what role remains for people.

The striking fact: Roman Yampolskiy, an AI expert, warns that we are not talking about 10% unemployment, but 99%. In five years, he says, all physical labor can also be automated. If he is right, the debate about immigration and employment has been, at best, a distraction.