Casino dealer Kanie Kastroll first saw it on the news — a robotic arm clumsily attempting to deal blackjack at a Las Vegas trade show, slow and fumbling its way through a hand.
“It was so primitive. It was painfully slow. And I thought oh man, they’re coming, you know?” Kastroll said.
Her fear of technological displacement drew her Wednesday evening to a town hall at Teamsters Local 631 in Las Vegas, where Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., gathered with workers from the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, Voto Latino, Teamsters and other organizations to discuss the future of artificial intelligence and automation in Nevada’s economy — and to warn that workers, not corporations, should be the primary beneficiaries of the coming technological wave.
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In 2019, MGM Resorts introduced automated cocktail dispensing machines in its service bars — a change that Culinary Union member Joe Silva said shifted added responsibility onto cocktail waitresses. That experience pushed the Culinary Union to seek technology protections in the five-year contracts it negotiated with Las Vegas resort companies in 2023, securing advance notification requirements when new technology is introduced, training for affected workers and severance pay for those who lose jobs to automation.