‘Robocalypse’? Not now.
The robots are coming! And they are going to take all our jobs! That’s not the message of Friday’s employment update fromthe Labor Department, which showed that the market for labor is still encouragingly brisk eight years into amoderate but steady economic recovery. Rather, it is a summary of an emerging conventional wisdom about the future ofwork, which holds that advances in technology, especially artificial intelligence, will soon enable machines to replace every sort ofworker from car-wash attendant to appellate lawyer.
To be sure, such ideas have a long history, going all theway back to England’s Luddites, the early-19th-centuryweavers who smashed mechanical looms in defense of their jobs. But the revolutionary technology of our times, from driverless cars to voice-command computing, makes the potential impact seem especially threatening— even if alarms about a “robocalypse” may be overblown. Certainly some of theworld’s leading economists are thinking hard about the future ofwork, if any; and the latest research received a hearing at no less august a venue than the recently completed European Central Bank conference in Sintra, Portugal. To summarize a paper presented there by economistsDavidAutor ofMITand Anna Salomons ofUtrecht University: There’s some reassuring news and some challenging news.
The reassuring part is that productivity growth of the kind associated with rapid, labor-saving technological advancement still results in overall higher employment. Yes, employment declines in one sector— manufacturing, say— but the resultant positive “spillover effects” spawnnew investment opportunities in new industries, which create new jobs. Autor and Salomons found that this dynamic prevailed across19 developed countries, theUnited States included, from1970 through 2007.It possibly grew less robust after the turn of the 21st century, the economists note, but the robocalypse is still not a short-run likelihood.
More challenging, however, is their finding that, in recent decades, employment growth has not been evenly distributed but rather “polarized,” in the sense that theUnited States and other developed economies are producing large numbers of jobs for highly skilledworkers and less-skilledworkers— but relatively few in between. This, in turn, has fed rising income inequality. Aclear policy implication, then, is that societies redouble their efforts to provide education and training, both to young people preparing to enter the labor market and to adults who are already in it but must constantly update their capabilities to compete. At the same time, governments should enact mildly redistributive policies, such as the earned-income tax credit wage subsidy, that augment earnings for those who are willing towork but whose skill levels might not otherwise gain them enoughwages to sustain a family.
Today’sworry about mass technological unemployment probablywon’t come to pass in its scariest imaginable form. Yet that’s no reason for complacency. The life prospects of fleshand-bloodworking people can’t just be left on autopilot.
This editorial first appeared in TheWashington Post.