https://www.wired.com/story/killing-dead-end-jobs-only-hurts-us/

This summer, Dishcraft released a new dishwashing robot. It’s only the latest invention that we’ll use in a way that threatens what I’m calling “on-ramp” jobs.

I loved being a dishwasher. Every summer for a few years in high school, I’d get up at 7 and walk half a mile from my house to a small breakfast joint. Don ran the place, Al was the cook, and Rick was backup. Compared to theirs, my job was dead simple: Take the dishes out of the bus trays, scrub them down, put them in a heavy-duty plastic rack, slide that into the dishwasher, wait until the cycle finishes, take out the cleaned tray, put the dishes away on a rack. And repeat—maybe 50 or 60 times a shift. Meanwhile I learned how to care for the machine, I enjoyed figuring out ways to do my job with fewer steps, I got to know Al and Rick, I heard their war stories, and I got a bit of an intuitive understanding of how our kitchen ran. That’s when Al asked me to step behind the oven.