Robots could take over nearly half of American jobs in next decade...
Are Robots About to Take Our Jobs?
Economists are warning about the coming robot
job-apocalypse. But where's the data?
By Catherine Hollander
Follow on TwitterMarch 11, 2014
Robots have been eliciting some strong feelings lately,
an irony that is surely lost on them. Economists warn that the amazing
technological strides made in recent years—everything from smartphones, to
automatons that can work safely on shop floors alongside humans, to driverless
cars—could soon put large swaths of the workforce out of a job.
"We are at an inflection point," MIT
researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee assert in their new book, The
Second Machine Age. "The key building blocks are already in place for
digital technologies to be as important and transformational to society and the
economy as the steam engine," the authors say.
The technological strides of the past few decades have
contributed to the nation's rising income inequality, they argue, because only
a small group of people tends to benefit income-wise from inventing the next
iPhone or tax-preparation software. And Brynjolfsson and McAfee believe the
biggest labor-market effects have yet to be felt. A separate 2013 study by
Oxford University researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne might
give a taste of what's to come; Frey and Osborne say that nearly half of
American jobs are at "high risk" of being taken over by robots in the
next decade or two. Economists take this idea seriously, and it has a number of
policy implications, particularly when it comes to higher education.
But while this futuristic scenario is scary or exciting,
depending on your point of view, a number of liberal economists argue that
there's just no evidence yet that this is the course the economy will chart.
"If technology is leading us to generate more output with fewer workers,
that should show up in higher productivity, and you don't really see
that," says Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President
Joe Biden who is now a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities. "Isn't that kind of intuitive?"
"The effects of new machine technology are not
showing up in productivity statistics—at least not yet—and productivity is by
far the most important driver of long-term economic growth," Christine
Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said last week.
"We certainly need to keep an eye on this."
Productivity growth and employment growth tracked each
other closely for decades but began to split in 2000. Lawrence Mishel, head of
the liberal Economic Policy Institute, argues that the widening gap we've seen
in recent years—often blamed on technology—isn't due to their spread at all,
but rather to weak growth and demand. Robots could theoretically be behind the
weak demand (if people are earning lower wages and being otherwise muscled out
of the labor market, they're less inclined to buy things), Bernstein says, but
that's not something economists can tease out of the data until the economy
returns to full employment.
Another place you'd expect to see signs of the robot
"job-apocalypse" is in businesses' investment in equipment, says Paul
Beaudry, an economist at the University of British Columbia's Vancouver School
of Economics. That pace has actually been declining over the past 14 years, he
says.
Beaudry doesn't dismiss the idea that robots could cause
human jobs to disappear down the line. But it would take a game-changing
technological advance, such as mass-marketed driverless cars. That "might
be around the corner," he adds. "We haven't seen it yet."
Brynjolfsson and McAfee aren't pessimistic about the
looming mass displacement from their hypothetical robot wave. They just think
policymakers need to intervene to prevent a skills gap from opening up as
people get shuffled around. And policymakers are paying attention. "To
borrow a Star Trek reference, how can we make the future look more like the
harmonious United Federation of Planets and less like the soul-destroying Borg
Collective?" IMF's Lagarde asked last week. She concluded that the educational
system of the future needs to focus on creative jobs, caring jobs, and ones
that involve craftsmanship. These are "the areas where humans can outclass
computers," she said.
Oxford's Frey and Osborne agree. "Our findings thus
imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to
tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization—i.e., tasks requiring
creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they
will have to acquire creative and social skills," they conclude.
But the flip side of blaming the robots is what Dean
Baker, codirector of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research,
worries about: that the robots-will-take-our-jobs story provides a convenient
excuse for policymakers to avoid casting the blame for widening inequality on
themselves. If the people who make and own robots get rich, it's because patent
laws allow people to charge a lot for them, Baker says. "If that's the
basis of inequality, I don't see that much as an excuse, in the sense that that's
policy-driven and not robot-driven."
Everyone agrees the world will look different as it fills
up with these technological advances. Will it be one of mass unemployment? Not
necessarily, and some economists are taking heart from the fact that robots don't
seem to be cropping up in the latest worrisome data about the labor market.
Now, will the robots one day rise up and revolt against us? That's a different
question.
This article appears in the March 8, 2014 edition of
National Journal Magazine as Before Blaming the Robots.
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