The tech leaders who just met with Trump are harbingers of an automated future

Getty/ Drew Angerer

President-elect Donald Trump met with the tech industry's top executives on Wednesday, and photos from the meeting made it readily apparent how uneasy the visitors to Trump Tower were about the facetime.

But less obvious was a detail journalist Nick Bilton pointed out on Twitter shortly after the meeting: Every tech leader's professional interests fly in the face of Trump's promises to revive dying American jobs.

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Elon Musk is developing driverless cars at Tesla, Jeff Bezos is working on drone delivery at Amazon, Ginni Rometty is developing Watson-powered robots at IBM. And so on.

Skye Gould/Business Insider

The companies represented in the meeting all have thousands of employees of their own and hire extensively in the US. But throughout his campaign, Trump promised to bring back the very kinds of low-skill jobs that the people in his conference room on Wednesday could help eradicate with their technology. 

Trump seem unfazed by the conflicts in vision.

"I'm here to help you folks do well," he told the group at one point. "We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation."