A brief update from the world of late-’90s written cliché. Surely I am not the only person who is periodically surprised to discover that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman remains unretired, no? One can admire his persistence if nothing else. His new column is almost reassuring in that regard, because while the decades may pass, Friedman can always be counted on to derive his biggest policy insights from hired transportation.

Once upon a time, it was in the taxicab that Friedman crystallized his best ideas, polishing his columns into diamonds of rhetorical persuasion. Many were capped off with the wit and wisdom of the cab-driving Abdullah or José to rhetorically seal the deal. (This style of writing has become an industry inside joke; the “Tom Friedman Taxicab Confession” describes a weakly argued opinion column that lazily relies on appeals to common authority, with “field research” no more serious than an Uber ride to LaGuardia.)

Friedman has always seen the future — this is a man who once revealed the world to be flat, but not before accurately predicting that McDonald’s would end armed conflict. And he is sounding the alarm bell once again with his newest shift: he’s moved on from cabs to the post-human future. Yes, Friedman has thrown in with the bots and declared himself a “Waymo Democrat,” adopting the name of the driverless cars that he claims are the bellwether technology of a better, more sensibly centrist future.

While respecting Friedman’s dogged adherence to the one successful rhetorical framework he has ever properly known — he will forever be the Man in the Backseat— we should be at least mildly amused and/or alarmed that he has cast his lot with our robot overlords. His answer to the question “How do we get more Americans making stuff again” is to become the country of “advanced manufacturing and AI.”

By this he means that a productive new generation of American manufacturing would see the United States winning the race to replace ourselves with machines that no longer require the use of human beings at all, save for mechanical upkeep or oversight. Why? Because Friedman drove in robo-taxis in China, Phoenix, and San Francisco and is convinced that this represents the automated future of all mankind. It is an incidental shame that he now has no more time for his old cabbie friends, whom he dismisses as “not in a growth industry.” But beyond ingratitude to his old source material, beyond the unlikelihood of high-tech manufacturing returning en masse to the United States, Friedman is also utterly blind to irony: his own proposed fantasy would merely shift the problem of human unproductivity and mass obsolescence to a new generation — if in fact it doesn’t hasten that outcome.