Editorial: A robot walked on to the shop floor
Tuesday, 30 June 2026
EDITORIAL: Last week, a company called Agility Robotics, based in Salem, Oregon, announced its intention to launch an initial public offering. The product it makes? Humanoid robots for warehouses.
Powered by artificial intelligence, these machines are designed to perform tasks previously undertaken by humans. The company’s proposed listing – valued at around US$2.5 billion, modest by AI standards – will test investor appetite for businesses built around putting AI into physical form. Before long, it may also test the appetite of employers and households for welcoming robots into everyday life.
It poses a question that sounds like science fiction, but is becoming increasingly real for markets, policymakers and politicians alike: are we building machines to replace ourselves?
AI is accelerating a trend that has been under way across Western economies for decades and, indeed, centuries. The real question is no longer where the low-skilled jobs are going. Most of them have already gone. The question is what jobs are going, or at least changing, next.
There are very few genuinely zero-skill jobs left in factories, offices or out in the paddock. The promise – and the threat – of AI, particularly in humanoid form, is that it will begin replacing jobs that until now have remained stubbornly human. Forklift drivers in warehouses, fulfilment centres and logistics hubs could well find themselves competing with machines. That is no longer the realm of science fiction.
Karl Marx imagined technological progress would eventually liberate workers from drudgery and repetitive labour. “To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner,” he famously wrote, “without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic”.
The reality will not be so utopian. Losing a job is losing a job. For many people it is a life-defining event.
The traditional defence of technological change is that society adapts. New industries emerge. Workers retrain. Better jobs replace the old ones. Newspaper typesetters, typists and many travel agents disappeared. The economy evolved.
The question hanging over AI is whether this disruption will arrive faster and spread further than previous technological revolutions. If it does, the consequences will extend beyond employment to everything from tax revenue to welfare systems and economic inequality.
It is not warehouse workers who have driven much of the anxiety around AI. It is middle-class professionals – the people who studied hard and expected secure white-collar careers – who are beginning to wonder whether technology is coming for them too.
Law firms and consultancies, including many in New Zealand, are embracing AI to perform research and drafting tasks that once occupied junior graduates for days. At the same time, many are quietly preparing for the day when clients ask why they should continue paying premium hourly rates for work that AI can produce in minutes.
Fortunately for management consultants, there are plenty of executive teams allergic to making decisions without an outsourced report.
It is also worth remembering AI services are not free. Users may simply have been enjoying a subsidised period. Uber recently capped employee AI usage after burning through its entire budget for 2026 AI use in just four months.
The greater challenge may not be replacing graduates, but training them. If AI performs the routine work, how do young professionals develop the judgement needed to supervise it effectively? Every profession will face that question.
The Luxon Government, too, sees AI as part of the answer to lifting productivity. Ministers believe it could eventually help reduce public service headcount by around 9000 positions. They should not assume that outcome will come easily.
The public sector, under Sir Brian Roche's leadership, is beginning its AI journey. It is right that government adopts these technologies more cautiously than private business. Public services carry greater risks and greater responsibilities.
But more slowly should not mean slow. AI is here to stay. Those who harness it will almost certainly enjoy significant gains in productivity and economic growth. Governments, businesses and workers should embrace those opportunities.
What they should not do is pretend there will be no cost. Every major technological revolution has produced winners and losers. Artificial intelligence will not be any different.