The unskilled fast food workers engaged in the “Fight for $15? campaign (or Lucha por 15 in Spanish)are cutting their own throats at the direction of unions because smart machines are ready and able to take their jobs.

Machines already exist that can do the cooking: Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers per Hour.

But the Wall Street Journal says McDonalds will move toward “technology. . . to order and pay for food digitally.” That means some sort of touchscreen gizmo that takes that takes orders, like the tablet shown below:

Tablets that take orders are already in use and aren’t as big an investment as robot burger cooks — Chili’s had 45,000 tablets in its restaurants as of January. But McDonald’s certainly must see the mechanized future of fast food and is planning accordingly for more advanced devices. Other food chains are taking notice as well that there are other choices besides of raising employee wages.

Restaurant automation is another example of humans becoming less necessary to production. Oxford University forecast last year that 45 percent of US jobs were vulnerable to robots or computerization in the next two decades. Another estimate is that one in three jobs will be done by smart machines by 2025 — that’s just 11 years from now.

Somebody should inform Washington that the correct number of immigrants in the post-human economy is Zero.

Here’s the WSJ’s pronouncement on the move to automation: