The Shutdown Is Actually a Tea Party Plot to Replace the Government with Robots

If you read between the lines, it becomes obvious that the government shutdown is actually a Tea Party plot to replace all government employees with robots.

You know the 800,000 government workers that have been forced to take unpaid leave because Tea Party Republicans think shutting down the government while they throw a tantrum over a democratically-passed healthcare law is an appropriate thing to do? Well, those absentee federal employees are ruining things for all of non-socialist America. Now, not even freedom-loving patriots (private sector employees) can go to national parks or museums, use government websites, get their food inspected, or access scientific data from institutions NASA and NOAA. This is unacceptable.

But so is paying real human beings with real families to feed money to do them, according to the Tea Party. Given their recent actions, the only explanation must be that the Tea Party plans to starve the beast, and replace it with robots. Here's how they'll do it.

They will probably use a recent scientific study, called The Future of Employment, as their guide. The report found that half of the jobs we used to be pretty sure would be safe from robots are actually under imminent threat of mechanization. A full 47 percent of American jobs are currently at risk of being taken over by computers.

In their analysis, the Oxford researchers analyzed how likely 700 different jobs were to become computerized in the near future. Many of them are government jobs. And when they are replaced by robots, those robots will be owned by private corporations and contracted out, like voting machines, or sold in massive deals, like drones and other military weapons. So captains of industry, those "job creators," will benefit mightily from the mass sale of the robot replacement workers of the future.

Take the IRS, the Tea Party's sworn enemy, for example. It has in this most recent shutdown been forced to furlough 91 percent of its nearly 100,000-person workforce. In the computerized future, however, there is a 93 percent chance that the jobs of "Tax Examiners and Collectors, and Revenue Agents" will be roboticized, and their human counterparts made redundant. If the shutdown continues long enough, the government will have no choice but to amass a robotic fleet of tax collectors.

If there's another agency the Tea Party hates as much as the IRS, it's the Environmental Protection Agency. And as it so happens, all but 1,000 of the EPA's 16,000 employees were furloughed. Coincidence? I think not. They're not too keen on the Department of Agriculture, either—or any of the the 17,000 employees the USDA had to send home.

The Tea Party must know that in the near future, there is a 94 percent chance that the position of Agricultural Inspector will be made obsolete by robots, and a 77 percent chance that Environmental Science and Protection Technicians jobs will become things of the past.

The Tea Party hates mass transit, too. They're always calling trains freedom-killers or such. And the US Transportation Department, meanwhile sent home 18,500 employees. In the future, there is a 90 percent chance that all transportation inspectors will be transformed into automated drones.

The Smithsonian has shut down its eighteen museums, of course, and sent 3,500 employees home without pay. Museums like this teach people about evolution and climate change and science, and are therefore anathema to the Tea Party. But in the future, there is a 59 percent chance Museum Technicians and Conservators will be robots, and they won't have a job to speak of at all. The Tea Party is counting on this, and is surely hoping to reprogram the workforce with robots that will inform visitors that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that humans co-existed with the dinosaurs.

We all know how the Tea Party feels about books. 2,000 employees of the National Archives have been sent home, and the Library of Congress has been closed. Fortunately, there is a 65 percent chance we will no longer need human librarians in the future.

Unfortunately for the Tea Party, and for American citizens everywhere, there are still some government jobs that we're unlikely to able to replace with robots anytime soon. Health and Safety Engineers are only 28 percent likely to be replaced by robots—and food inspectors have indeed been furloughed. We'll just have to live with higher quantities of E. Coli-laden beef, then.

And the Department of Labor, which collects employment data for Americans and issues regular job forecasts, sent 13,500 people home. It turns out we actually need them. There is only a 22 percent chance that statisticians will be replaced by robo-mathematicians anytime soon. But who needs math and job reports in the future?

Finally, there may even be an Ayn Rand acolyte or two that finds it too bad that 97 percent of all of NASA has been sent home right now. And they may regret that astronomers and astrophysicists will become obsolete, because there is only a 4 percent chance that they will be replaced by telescope-gazing robo-minds.

But alas. It is a small price to pay. Our new robo-government may be entirely incurious about science, and it will probably let poisoned food through to the public, and let pollution clog our communities, and it might be incapable of doing statistics—but at least it will be efficient, unwhiny, and almost entirely privatized. You will even be able to drown it in a bathtub, because everyone knows robots malfunction upon first contact with water.

The Tea Party has seen the future, and it is a beast starved and replaced with unblinking machines.