Illusions Lost: An Elegy in Three Parts

200 years ago David Ricardo - that great advocate of free trade to exploit the wealth-enhancing benefits of comparative advantage - admitted the Luddites were right. Replacing paid workers with unpaid machines permanently reduces the need for human workers and renders the human population "redundant" to the owners of the machines. {David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter XXXI On Machinery (1817)}

Today we are approaching the logical conclusion of that process. Here's what it looks like.