content: Companies aren't voluntarily leaving huge amounts of money on the table. When robots can perform comparably to humans and for a cheaper price, humans are out. Whether humans get paid $7.50 an hour, $15 an hour, or even $1 an hour the price of the robot eventually becomes better. Technology becomes cheaper. Humans become more expensive. At $7.50 that's a bare minimum of $15,000 a year for a company that offers no benefits, pays no social security, or anything else. Bringing the cost of robots down to be competitive against that is trivial - and again that's for exactly one year. Humans also expect raises, upward mobility, time off, sick days, run late thanks to traffic, and so on. On top of it they're also unpredictable. Sometimes they make a great pizza. Sometimes they get distracted and the crust ends up bungled, or overcooked, or end up putting the wrong ingredients on the pizza, and so on. All of these problems are solved instantly by robots which can produce the exact same product, flawlessly, over and over - 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year. And raising the minimum wage from a social perspective is important. Companies paying less than the cost of living is absurd. It turns our social programs into yet another corporate subsidy. For instance today about 52% of fast food workers rely on government assistance to make ends meet. You can say go get a better job, but there are not millions of jobs out there that they could magically move up to and start making real money at. So instead of that companies pay less than is necessary to live, and tax payers cover the rest of what should have been their salary to begin with. Those programs are critical to provide a limit on how far people can fall not only from an ethical point of view but also a pragmatic one. When somebody falls low enough, they don't just peacefully die off. They turn into a cornered animal, and society gets to pay the price for that as we in America already are today.