Automation is treated across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as a recurring economic phenomenon rather than a novel threat, with guests and host disputing both the novelty of AI-driven job displacement and the wisdom of deploying machines to replace rather than assist human workers.
AI, automation and the Luddite parallel
In an October 2017 episode, Bob Zadek framed artificial intelligence as a subject surrounded by misunderstanding and fear — fear that robots would take over jobs and leave humans servicing machines Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017). He noted that machinery has generally been welcomed for making people more productive and commodities cheaper, setting aside what he called moments of hysteria such as the Luddite movement in England, when sewing machines were destroyed because they were taking away jobs. Zadek asked whether AI is simply the next step in a logical continuum or somehow different.
MIT professor Luis Perez-Breva answered that AI has the potential to be as beneficial as cars and the other innovations Zadek cited. He said people err when they treat AI as different, because they compare present-day press coverage of AI with historians’ retrospective accounts of sewing machines. Historians, he said, paint a more rational picture because they have more elements and hindsight, whereas the press conveys fears. Perez-Breva speculated that reading the press of the sewing-machine era would have produced the same feeling that the change was unprecedented.
Replacing versus enabling humans
Zadek asked for an example of an attempt to replace humans with automation that failed. Perez-Breva cited the United States Postal Service, which 20 years earlier decided it needed to cut its human workforce because routes could be automated and it would no longer need as many people. According to most business experts, Perez-Breva said, the USPS missed the flourishing of the parcel delivery business, with UPS and others taking over, mostly because the service lost its human expertise Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017).
Perez-Breva generalized from the case: every time people think automation — not even AI, just automation — can fully replace humans, they shoot their own foot, in a long-term way. Automation, he argued, should free humans from easily automated tasks so they can do more value-adding work; using technology to replace rather than enable humans is a misuse of the technology, whether it is AI or something else. Asked whether the USPS failed because it executed badly or because the task was inherently impossible, Perez-Breva said he would need to know more about what the agency did, but that in his view there is no way for anyone who thinks they can remove humans through automation to win in the long term.
Driverless cars and the question of control
A caller named Jacob raised the prospect that Congress is removing roadway lane marker buttons that warn drivers they are drifting out of their lane, which he described as paving the way for machine drivers to displace human drivers, and asked whether the trend is less autonomy for humans and more for machines. Zadek put the question to Perez-Breva as more sociological or governmental than scientific Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017).
Perez-Breva said the technology to make a single car driverless today is incredibly expensive, and that bringing it to scale raises the question of whether Uber would own every car on earth or whether drivers would retrofit their own cars. He described two futures: one in which an evil corporation replaces all drivers and makes money off cars, and another in which a person’s car drives on its own and earns money without the person in it. He doubted anything would completely replace all human drivers, and challenged people to think about how anyone would pay to retrofit every car and what would be done with the other drivers. Zadek responded that it depends on who is in power and how much society forces decision-making to be governed by machines, citing airline websites that constrain what a customer can do, and imagining a dystopian world in which one moves out like Ted Kaczynski to a cabin in Montana and lives off the grid.
Automation as one factor among many in wages
In a May 2019 episode on illegal immigration, Zadek argued that the negative wage effect of immigration falls on a small cohort — which Alex Nowrasteh specified as native-born Americans who are high school dropouts, about 9% of the population. Zadek then listed automation among the many factors that reduce wages for that cohort, alongside new products and the movement of capital. These factors, he said, reduce wages for one group while benefiting society profoundly as a whole What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019). He asked why people do not rail against efficiency, which also destroys jobs, and invoked automatic elevators displacing elevator operators as an example of a labor-saving change that should not have been opposed.
Automation, unions and firm rigidity
In a December 2022 episode, Richard Epstein discussed labor relations and the National Labor Relations Act, arguing that workers and firms both lose when a firm has less flexibility, and that workers get high wages for a short period before the firm’s market share shrinks Which Side Are You On? (2022). Epstein recalled General Motors’ workforce: he asked Zadek how many workers there were in 1979, Zadek said a little less than a million or around a million, and Epstein said about half a million by that time; when the company went bankrupt, it had 42,000 people working for it. Zadek interjected “Or machines,” and Epstein agreed, saying automation is a constant threat and that more automation will take place in the fast-food industry. Epstein described automation as a form of age discrimination in the sense that his young grandsons have worked with machines since birth while he started out with an Underwood typewriter in 1955 whose keys would get stuck. He predicted that firms will be forced into systems that are better than a regulatory system but worse than a market one.
Across episodes: no development, a recurring theme
Automation appears in all four episodes as a subordinate theme rather than the primary subject, and the excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatment: Perez-Breva in 2017 and Epstein in 2022 both cast automation as a constant feature of economic life, with Perez-Breva emphasizing the misuse of replacing rather than enabling humans and Epstein emphasizing automation as a threat that firms and workers must accommodate.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not offer a definition of automation as a technical term, nor do they quantify its aggregate effect on employment or wages. They do not discuss specific legislation governing automation, nor any court case turning on it. The 2019 and 2022–23 excerpts place automation inside arguments about immigration and labor law rather than treating it as a subject in its own right.