I was recently in Kansas City. My Uber driver was Jesse — sharp, easy to talk to. He mentioned, almost offhandedly, that his girlfriend's mother and a close friend had just moved in with them. Between housing costs and gas prices, the math had stopped adding up for him.

Jesse drives people for a living. He is one of roughly 1.6 million rideshare drivers in the U.S.

The same week I was there, PepsiCo announced the largest deployment of fully autonomous delivery trucks in American history — a $600 million investment, partnering with Gatik AI. Medium-duty Isuzu trucks, many carrying Doritos and Frito-Lay products, have been running with no human on board since June 2025 on fixed short-haul routes between distribution centers, bottling plants, and stores like Walmart and Dollar General. The fleet has logged zero accidents and a 99 percent on-time delivery rate.

PepsiCo is not just experimenting. Gatik, Isuzu, and Nvidia are developing a production facility in South Carolina that will begin mass-producing Level 4 autonomous trucks in the second half of 2027. "The volumes that we're looking at for this year are in the hundreds of trucks," said Gatik's CEO.

America has 3.5 million truck drivers. Do the math slowly.

Now extend the logic to Jesse's world. Waymo alone operates nearly 3,800 robotaxis on American roads and is targeting 20 new U.S. markets by end of 2026. Tesla, Amazon's Zoox, and others are scaling fast. The robotaxi is no longer science fiction — it is a Tuesday morning in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Austin.

These are not distant disruptions. They are already here.

And into this landscape, add a statistic that deserves far more attention than it gets: 32 percent of all U.S. adults personally own a gun — roughly 83 million people. Ownership is highest in rural areas, skewing toward men without college degrees — the exact demographic most exposed to automation displacement. 47 percent of rural adults own a gun, compared to just 20 percent of urban adults.

Here is the compound risk nobody in Washington is connecting: Millions of working-class Americans — truckers, drivers, delivery workers — are watching their livelihoods get automated away. They are moving in together to survive. And they live in a country with more guns than people, inside a legal system that, in many states, effectively decriminalizes retail theft below certain dollar thresholds.

Walk into any CVS or Walgreens in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York today. Between 2019 and 2023, 69 percent of American retailers increased their use of merchandise-locking cages. In 2024, 20 percent of retailers closed store locations entirely in response to retail theft.

You ring a bell to get toothpaste — this is not an exaggeration. This is Tuesday in America.

California's Proposition 47, passed in 2014, downgraded theft of property valued below $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. Critics argue this gave organized theft rings effective legal cover — criminal gangs learned to steal repeatedly just below the felony threshold, across jurisdictional lines, hitting the same stores again and again. That law has been changed, but a decade of brazen shoplifting and store closures has already taken its toll.

When institutions fail to protect the social contract, people find their own enforcement mechanisms. That is not commentary — that is history.

I am not writing this as alarm. I am writing this as pattern recognition. Every society that has experienced rapid technological displacement without a parallel investment in retraining, safety nets, and civic trust has paid a price. Sometimes that price comes in the form of elections. Sometimes it comes in the form of something harder to reverse.

America's political class is debating candidates' dietary choices. Meanwhile, Jesse in Kansas City is fitting two extra people into his apartment and hoping the algorithm keeps sending him rides — before the algorithm decides it no longer needs him at all.

The question worth asking is not whether automation will displace millions of blue-collar workers in America. That is already happening. The question is, what is the plan for Jesse and people like him?

Chocko Valliappa is a fourth-generation entrepreneur and Chairman of the Sona Group, a century-old Indian conglomerate spanning education, manufacturing, and technology across India and the UAE. He is the founder of HireMee, a skills-based hiring platform recognised with a YPO Global Impact Award and a Top-5 XPRIZE finalist for Rapid Reskilling, connecting millions of job-seekers to employers across emerging economies.

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