Claims of “positive” automation today generally perpetuate similar myths about the impact of the washing machine: Leisure time will increase, fewer hours per worker will be needed, consumer prices will fall, people will consume more goods, and profits will rise. Pro-automation rhetoric posits that while automation has eliminated some jobs, don’t worry! It will create others. The problem is that the jobs that have been eliminated—in fact often prioritized for automation—are the very ones that have tended to be unionized, paying people a union wage, and the “new” jobs that get created are nonunion, low wage, no- to low-benefit jobs. The only other positive argument people make about robots and automation has to do with removing workers from dangerous environments. But it’s the actual environment itself, not just the workers, that can’t tolerate the industries that create those jobs, from cleaning out melting-down nuke plants to deep mining to chemical manufacturing. We don’t need to automate those jobs: we need to replace those industries with highly unionized clean energy.