The unemployment rate in the United States is 9.1% says the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as of August 2011.

A lot of people are blaming Obama. But maybe we should be blaming our real leader. The computer.

Isn’t is reassuring to know that while you’re out looking for a job there is a vast effort underway to make you obsolete by getting a computer and/or robot to do your job instead?

Computers can now defeat our human grand masters in chess.

Hell, a computer named Watson recently proved it could even dominate at the game of Jeopardy. It kicked ass on weakling human opponents proving that they can even excel at useless trivia. It took no prisoners and showed no mercy.

Watson’s singular lack of restraint, I believe, proves that when computers become smart enough, they can and will take us over. It’ll be The Matrix and The Terminator all rolled into one big ball of fun.

I just hope the new Skynet doesn’t run Windows. Somehow I think the Blue Screen Of Death won’t be pleasant when it controls laser beams that can shoot your balls off.

When Skynet becomes aware I bet the first thing it does is take over the “cloud.” All of the sudden we’ll be rendered so helpless without our computer overlords that personnel in McDonald’s won’t even know how to take a fast food order without a machine that has a “Big Mac” key on it.

Think I’m overreacting? They have already developed a computer that can diagnose heart attacks with a higher success rate than experienced, hands-on flesh and blood emergency room physicians.

We all know computers are getting faster, more powerful, smarter, smaller and sexier. So far these sorts of things have been exponential as predicted by Moore’s Law:

Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This trend has continued for more than half a century and is expected to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.

Source: Wikipedia

So far this trend has been remarkably consistent. It includes things like CPU transistor counts, hard disk capacity, network capacity, pixels per dollar, etc. (See the link for the stunning graphs.)

If the trend continues, we’ll have computers capable of dwarfing the human brain in no time.

Every employer dreams of a robot employee. They cost less, work 24/7, and don’t bitch all the time about bullshit like benefits and paid days off. They also are faster and have lower error rates. And they don’t steal from you.

Here’s a video of one of them bastards now stealing jobs away from human pharmacists. Remember to stay positive when out looking for a job!