Workers have been losing their jobs to machines in the name of productivity and efficiency since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

But the pace of automation, 200 years later, is truly extraordinary.

I was reminded of that last week when I took my first overseas trip since the pandemic began.

For the first time, I didn’t see anyone around to help me when I arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and checked in for my flight at a self-serve kiosk. In the past, there’s always been someone there to assist the technologically incompetent.

It was the first time I didn’t hand my boarding pass to a human as I filed onto the plane. I merely scanned it and walked through an automatic turnstile, with no one present to check on me.

Returning home from Frankfurt, Germany, I printed my own luggage tags from a machine and then hoisted my bag myself onto an unmanned conveyor belt, where it was security-checked by a machine rather than a person and sent on its way. This is what the industry calls a “self-service bag drop solution.”

I can’t be sure, but based on what I’ve read, it’s possible that at both airports, my suitcase was conveyed to the plane not by workers but by robots. (Will that help reduce the number of bags delayed, damaged or lost each year — 24.8 billion of them in 2018?)

Coming back through passport control at LAX, I stopped at yet another self-service kiosk. The machine took a photo of me, identified me from the image and OKd me for entry into the country. The ID was done through “biometric facial comparison technology” and involved no fingerprints, no passports, no questions. At the end, I handed a piece of paper to a guy who barely looked at it, saying only, “Welcome home.”

(U.S. Customs and Border Protection says machine identification cuts the processing time of a typical Global Entry passenger by almost 90%, from 45 seconds to less than 6 seconds. That means I gained 39 extra seconds to help offset the agonizing 20 minutes or more of crawling through traffic to get out of LAX and onto city streets.)

Outside the terminal, passengers called for Ubers without the help of taxi dispatchers, and then were met by cars that we all know will soon drive themselves. Workers are scarce at the parking garages too, what with the ticket-dispensing machines, free-standing pay stations and automated gates.

How long before pilots are replaced by robots that fly planes more safely?

This is the world we live in. There’s nothing new about it or inherently wrong with it. The revolution in computing, robotics and artificial intelligence offers extraordinary benefits that only fools would reject out of hand. But while automation is clearly good for corporations and is presumably good for consumers, how is it for the baggage handlers?

LAX officials insist that in most cases, these automation changes don’t mean fewer jobs, often because new ones are being created in the process. But for travelers, “Do the work yourself” is the new mantra.

The country, and indeed the world, is clearly headed for an extraordinary wave of robotization and automation — and not just in travel. In February, the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that 45 million U.S. workers would lose their jobs to automation by 2030. The pandemic sped up the transformation, the report found.

McKinsey had earlier concluded that as many as half the jobs people do in the world could theoretically be automated — including not just low-pay, relatively unskilled jobs but also many high-skilled white-collar jobs.

The optimistic view is this: History shows that technological advances can save labor time and costs, improve safety and efficiency, and benefit customers — while also spurring growth and generating more, new and often better jobs. There’s short-term displacement, to be sure; some jobs have been lost forever. But economists say the losses have been counterbalanced over time.