Here’s some good news and some bad news in a Washington Post article. First, it’s heartening to learn that Senator Tom Cotton grasps the idea of automation reducing the need for immigrant workers, as tweeted and then reported.

The bad news is the splatter-shot Post piece doesn’t explore serious projections of future job loss, but relies on shallow refutations by economists.

By “serious projections” I mean predictions from actual tech experts who know the subject and extrapolate accordingly. For example, consider actual forecasts from the tech world:

Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. The consultancy firm PwC published a report last year that forecast robots could take 38 percent of US jobs by 2030. Last November the McKinsey Global Institute reported that automation “could displace up to 800 million workers — 30 percent of the global workforce — by 2030.” Forrester Research estimates that robots and artificial intelligence could eliminate nearly 25 million jobs in the United States over the next decade, but it should create nearly 15 million positions, resulting in a loss of 10 million US jobs.

Below, human workers have largely disappeared from many automotive factories.

A common ploy also used by the Post is to argue that the automated future will create new employment — “history suggests new jobs will replace old ones” — which is not exactly true: the explanation gets sketchy about how many new occupations will be forthcoming, how much training they might require or what the pay will be. It’s doubtful that businesses are investing great sums of money for automation and intend to keep the same number of employees: the whole point of investing in smart machines is to save money by reducing labor costs.

The Post article was reprinted by the Miami Herald, so click away: