California senator Kamala Harris doesn’t really need to prove her nerd bona fides to anybody at this point—after all, just this morning she spent several hours smacking around a dark-hearted, racist elf in true Dungeons And Dragons style. But never let it be said she won’t drop an X-Men reference to make a point. io9 reports that Harris recently fielded a question about the job market of the future by drawing parallels to Fox’s recent superhero hit Logan.
Harris was on Crooked Media’s Pod Save America when she was asked about what’s likely to happen to some traditional industries as technology moves forward. Referring to the self-driving trucks that appear frequently in James Mangold’s recent film—most notably in a car chase sequence around the movie’s midway point—Harris pointed out that they’re not exactly science-fiction at this point. “It’s going to happen,” she noted, “And there are people who’ve had jobs for generations around driving a car or a truck that in some relatively short period of time won’t have those jobs anymore. What we have to do in terms of the economic message is to one, speak the truth, and then two, have a plan for transitioning them into the jobs that will be there.”
Of course, Harris didn’t cover every potential impact of self-driving trucks on America’s driving industry—like, say, what to do if Richard E. Grant decides to use them to wipe out America’s hard-working, claw-handed limo chauffeurs. But it’s still nice to see someone in power thinking about how best to mitigate the effects of our oncoming and inevitable superhero dystopia.
[Note: io9, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]