Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. In the United States, where consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity, commerce has come to a standstill as people stay home to slow the virus’ spread. Hotels and restaurants and airlines have taken massive hits; Delta has cut its flight capacity by 70 percent. One in five US households has already lost work. And that’s all because of the vulnerabilities of the human worker. When we get sick—or we have to shelter in place to avoid getting sick—the work that depends on people grinds to a stop.

Why haven’t the machines saved us yet?

This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We’ve been led to believe that a new wave of automation is here, made possible by smarter AI and more sophisticated robots. San Francisco has even considered a tax on robots—replace a human with a machine, and pay a price. The problem will get so bad, argue folks like former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, we’ll need a universal basic income to support our displaced human workers. (UBI seems to have actually arrived, in a sense, with the Trump administration’s proposed payout to American households to weather the crisis: A $1,000 check for most, with an extra $500 for every child.)

Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity. You’re more likely to have a machine automate part of your job, not destroy your job entirely. Moving from typewriters to word processors made workers more efficient. Increasingly sophisticated and sensitive robotic arms can now work side-by-side on assembly lines with people without flinging our puny bodies across the room, doing the heavy lifting and leaving the fine manipulation of parts to us. The machines have their strengths—literally in this case—and the humans have theirs.

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“Robots can very successfully augment human activities,” says Julie Carpenter, a roboticist and research fellow at the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “They can do the labor we don't want to do or can't do, and are especially successful at carrying out tasks that we consider repetitive, boring, or dangerous,” like lifting car doors on an assembly line, for example.

But they’re not very smart, especially when it comes to problem-solving. Think about how you would pick up a piece of paper that’s lying flat on a table. You can’t grip it like you would an apple—you have to either pinch it to get it to lift off the surface, or drag it to hang over the edge of the table. As a kid, you learn to do that through trial and error, whereas you’d have to program a robot with explicit instructions to do the same.

During the pandemic, this contrast between humans and machines has become particularly fascinating in Amazon’s warehouses. Last week, Amazon officials announced that in response to the coronavirus they were hiring 100,000 additional humans to work in fulfillment centers and as delivery drivers, showing that not even this mighty tech company can do without people. But it, too, is automating parts of jobs. In one warehouse near the Denver airport, the company has deployed squat little robots that ferry packages between human workers—doing the heavy lifting while leaving the fine manipulation of objects to people.

Amazon’s automation technology will only get better from here. But the demand for products will keep climbing as well, as we’re seeing with this hiring bonanza. “Their need for human labor may fall through time, but for now the growth in demand for their products outstrips any gains from automation,” says Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and visiting professor at the University of Utah.