Labor Day 2015 is not a hopeful occasion for American workers, given the changing workplace where humans are becoming less needed because of smart machines.

CBS News had a sobering report on Saturday about technological unemployment. NYU Professor Gary Marcus remarked, “Eventually I think most jobs will be replaced, like 75 or 80 percent of the people are not going to work for a living.”

How an economy or society could work based on 80 percent unemployment has not been sorted out. Fortunately the state of mega-joblessness based on unstoppable technology is decades in the future, although we are feeling the initial effects now in the jobless recovery. A 2013 examination done by the Associated Press found that much of the failure of the jobs economy is due to the increasing use of automation, robots and computers to perform the tasks formerly done by humans:

Millions Of Middle-Class Jobs Killed By Machines In Great Recession’s Wake, AP , January 13, 2013 Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What’s more, these jobs aren’t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren’t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers. They’re being obliterated by technology. Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived. “The jobs that are going away aren’t coming back,” says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of “Race Against the Machine.” '’I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years.”

Jerry Kaplan (recently interviewed by Paul Solman) is author of the just released Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Kaplan pointed out in the CBS piece that self-driving cars and trucks could put three million professional drivers out of work. And that’s just one industry.

It’s clear that America does not need to import millions of immigrant workers because of a mythical future labor shortage; the automation revolution in the workplace changes all that.

But hardly anyone in Washington is paying attention — why not?