This is an opinion column.

This week the Washington Post killed its free commuter paper, Express. Newspapers have died before, and typically, when they go, a warm, bittersweet staff photo anchors the front page. Somewhere above it in big letters, there’s a “Thank You” and/or “Goodbye.”

But not this time.

“Hope you enjoy your stinkin’ phones,” the paper’s last front page told its readers.

Express wanted everyone to understand its death came at the hands of technological progress.

I’ve seen a lot of ... progress.

I’ve done about every job there is at a newspaper, not just this one. I’ve burned plates for the presses, laid out pages on pasteboards, developed film and stocked racks. I even sold an ad once, and I never did it again. I know what I’m good at, and what I’m not.

And I’ve seen many of those duties disappearing behind me — to technology. Nobody develops film anymore. Nobody pastes up pages. Nobody burns plates. These duties — jobs for people — have disappeared like Express from its racks in Washington.

Progress.

This not a requiem for the newspaper business. Rather, it’s an example that’s close to home, at least for me. In nearly every line of work, it seems, there’s less work. But the jobs that are disappearing are easy to miss unless they’re your own.

Progress is coming.

When you go through the self-check-out line at the store, that’s one less cashier, and internet sales now threaten all of retail. At law firms, online databases have replaced legions of paralegals. Bank tellers were probably first to get hit when ATMs arrived. Now that we’re moving to a cashless society, even the ATMs and those who stock and maintain them are threatened.

There’s a myth in this country that we lost manufacturing. Domestic production is near an all-time high, having climbed steadily for the last 40 years. It’s the jobs that disappeared.

There are close to four million truck drivers in this country whose turn will come soon when those big rigs learn to drive themselves.

Progress is quickening.

Since the Luddites — the actual Luddites, not your uncle with the flip phone — there have been alarmists warning that technology will destroy all the jobs. So far those doomsday predictions have all fallen flat. And yes, unemployment is low.

But there’s reason to be alarmed about the jobs our gig economy has created. Driving for Uber doesn’t come with things, like 401(k) or health insurance, to keep you out of poverty when you’re too old to work.

And some of the smartest people in this country — the people who create the very technologies putting people out of work — are now beginning to worry whether that disruption is outpacing the new jobs those changes create.

One of those folks is running for president.

I’m not sure I want Andrew Yang to be president. Single-issue candidates tend to make horrible elected officials. (Mexico paid for that wall yet?) But Yang has dragged into the public an idea overdue for consideration: Universal basic income.

Yang calls his plan a “freedom dividend” because, as he admits, that tests better, and universal basic income has been called by different names. The libertarian economist Milton Friedman (hardly a lefty socialist) proposed something similar, which he called a negative income tax.

In short, everyone gets a check from the government that gives them enough to survive. What you make on top of that, is gravy. Under Yang’s plan, all citizens over 18 would receive $1,000 a month, which Yang would fund with a value-added tax.

I don’t know whether that plan would work. The important thing is that Yang has introduced a marginal idea into the mainstream and it’s worth serious consideration.

It’s natural to try to understand something new in terms of something old. Natural but wrong. The right will likely decry universal basic income as socialism. Free money, free everything! The left just as likely attack technological progress as capitalism run amok. People before profits!

But I believe what’s coming is neither socialism nor capitalism, but rather, a new economic order that doesn’t yet have a name.

It’s not impossible to imagine a future, for our kids or grandkids, where automation, apps, and artificial intelligence do most, if not all, of the jobs. Incrementally, we’re already moving in that direction. That future might be unavoidable, and when it gets here what do people do then for money? How does an economy like that even work?

We’ve got to figure out what that future looks like now, and shape it now.

Before progress sneaks up on the rest of us while we’re busy staring at our stinkin’ phones.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

Want to see cute pictures of my kids (and some political stuff, now and then)? Come find me on Instagram. Want to troll me for my hot takes? I’m on Twitter, too.

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