Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs (nytimes.com)

Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they've declared a different winner: the robots. From a report on the New York Times: The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots. The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts. From a report on The Verge, which looks at another finding in the study: They found that each new robot added to the workforce meant the loss of between 3 and 5.6 jobs in the local commuting area. Meanwhile, for each new robot added per 1,000 workers, wages in the surrounding area would fall between 0.25 and 0.5 percent.

Comments

Re:Shipping

[MightyYar]

Don't think I'm missing your point, because I'm not. I agree with everything you said, I'm just going to go off on a tangent based on your mention of Sears...

Sears has internal problems, certainly - but in large part it is doomed no matter how well run due to past strategic decisions. Back when their main business was mail order, they insisted on publishing their huge tome and sending it to every home in the USA at considerable expense. Meanwhile, specialty catalogs like LL Bean were eating their lunch. Sears had the largest database about the buying habits of US consumers in existence, and yet instead of using that to their advantage to send out more frequent, seasonal, targeted specialty catalogs they stubbornly plowed ahead with the massive yearly tome. In addition, they built a huge, expensive retail presence in the emerging mall phenomenon, a trend which has since evaporated. This has left them with little mail-order (now internet) presence and a bunch of noncompetitive white elephants at now-empty malls. The entire corporation could function as single, well-oiled machine and it would still fail at this point.