Over at the exclusive Milken Institute confab this week, wealthy and important people were warning about the coming robot jobs apocalypse that endangers employment across the skills spectrum.

As an example of the increasing insertion of automation into society, here is a BBC report about the four-day conference read by a robot:

It didn’t sound very human-like to me. Perhaps it isn’t supposed to.

Here are some actual humans discussing the automation vs. employment issue at the Milken conference in a panel titled, “Jobs and Technology: Is Any Job Truly Safe?”

Back in the real world economy, the April jobs report was a disappointing 160,000 net new jobs created, the lowest number so far this year. In addition, more than 94 million Americans were not participating in the workforce as of last month, a rather shocking number. Whatever is going on in the employment economy, job creation is not happening.

Why should anyone be surprised? Automation started taking jobs with the invention of the ATM (Automated Teller Machine) in 1969 which has put many human banking clerks out of work. Customers can now use self-service machines to gas up the car, purchase groceries and check in at the airport — automation which saves money for the companies utilizing it.

There’s lot more smart machinery behind the scenes, like the robots that now do about 80 percent of automotive manufacturing, as well as the Kiva carry-bots that enable Amazon to process millions of customer purchases with rapid speed.

If the important people are aware of the automation threat to the economy, does that mean our elected representatives might wake up soon? Perhaps presidential candidates or other politicians might even make the mental leap to the idea that importing immigrant workers is not appropriate to our modern times.

In short, Automation makes immigration obsolete.

Back to a report on the Milken conference (see more videos here):