Is it time to bow to our robot overlords? Last week analysts at Morgan Stanley , using data from an Oxford University study, predicted that nearly half of U.S. jobs will be replaced by robots over the next two decades. Ouch. Maybe we should build a wall.

Cars that drive themselves? Waiters you don’t need to pay (or tip)? Self-folding clothes? Are we headed toward a post-job future? Signs are certainly there. Abundant Robotics, a company spun from the same Stanford Research Institute that brought us the mouse and networked computing, has begun testing a robot that picks apples. Red Delicious, not iPhones. Napa Valley vineyards are using vision systems to sort grapes.

According to a 2013 Stanford University study, some manufacturing robots now cost the equivalent of about $4 an hour—and they keep getting cheaper . . . and better. This month scientists at MIT have sampled a silicon chip-based LIDAR—light detection and ranging—like radar but much higher resolution, though it covers a shorter distance.

The Tesla Model S currently uses one radar sensor and one front-facing camera as vision for its Autopilot. Neither, sadly, picked out a white tractor trailer against a bright sky before a May 7 collision that killed a Tesla driver. LIDAR would. Current LIDAR can cost up to $70,000. The new chip? Maybe $10. At that price, they’ll probably be standard in every new car, “self-driving” or not.

And now we have thinking robots. Editors at the Associated Press claim robots write thousands of articles a year for them. So it’s over? The robots win? This certainly fits a certain world view for a bigger welfare state and universal basic income and other services to coddle displaced workers. See the May 26 Fortune magazine article “What Governments Can Do When Robots Take Our Jobs.”