One of the oddest phenomena in human behavior is something known as a gapers block – which is essentially a traffic jam that magically occurs on the opposite side of a highway from a car crash. Nothing is physically present to create a gapers block other than our curiosity to see what happened. Literally we just can’t not look.

I don’t think there’s a better way to describe the past few years of media coverage on job automation. It’s been a complete gapers block. A small portion of retail workers are laid off and everyone’s outlook on the future comes crashing down. We all are susceptible to reading the headlines and thinking we get the whole story from, “47% of US jobs at risk for automation.”