Age of robots, AI to bring better jobs, study says

L. Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered an intellectual call to arms to the university’s faculty in November 2017: Help generate insights into how advancing technology has changed and will change the workforce, and what policies would create opportunity for more Americans in the digital economy.

That issue, he wrote, is the “defining challenge of our time.”

Three years later, the task force assembled to address it is publishing its wide-ranging conclusions. The 92-page report, “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines,” was released Tuesday.

The group is made up of MIT professors and graduate students, researchers from other universities, and an advisory board of corporate executives, government officials, educators and labor leaders. In an extraordinarily comprehensive effort, they included labor market analysis, field studies and policy suggestions for changes in skills-training programs, the tax code, labor laws and minimum-wage rates.

Here are four of the key findings in the report:

Most workers have fared poorly

It is well known that those on the top rungs of the job ladder have prospered for decades while wages for average American workers have stagnated. But the MIT analysis goes further. It found, for example, that real wages for men without four-year college degrees have declined 10% to 20% since their peak in 1980. (Two-thirds of American workers do not have four-year college degrees.)

The U.S. economy produces larger wage gaps, proportionately fewer high-quality jobs and less intergenerational mobility than most other developed nations do, the researchers found. And

America does not seem to get a compensating payoff in growth.

“The U.S. is getting a low ‘return’ on its inequality,” the report said.

Nor does the lagging position of American workers appear to be the result of technology.

AI not about to deliver jobless future

Technology has always replaced some jobs, created new ones and changed others. The question is whether things will be different this time as robots and artificial intelligence quickly take over for humans on factory floors and in offices.

The MIT researchers concluded that the change would be more evolutionary than revolutionary. In fact, they wrote, “we anticipate that in the next two decades, industrialized countries will have more job openings than workers to fill them.”

That judgment is informed by field research in several industries and sectors including insurance, health care, driverless vehicles, logistics and warehouses, advanced manufacturing, and small and medium-size manufacturers.

For self-driving cars and trucks, the MIT researchers concluded that widespread use was still a decade or more away. In warehouses, Amazon has made great strides with automated conveyance systems and some robotics, but its warehouses run on human labor, and will for years.

Worker training needs to match market

“The key ingredient for success is public-private partnerships,” said Annette Parker, president of South

Central College, a community college in Minnesota, and a member of the advisory board to the MIT project.

The schools, nonprofits and corporate-sponsored programs that have succeeded in lifting people into middle-class jobs all echo her point: the need to link skills training to business demand.

Parker points to the development of the hybrid field of “mechatronics,” which combines basic mechanical, electronics and digital skills for maintaining modern machinery. Salaries go up to $80,000, she said, adding that “everybody who is automating needs them.”

The report points to programs that offer alternative paths to education and skills training. IBM created a program, P-TECH, that combines high school, community college and work experience with IBM and other companies.

Workers need more power, voice

The report calls for raising the minimum wage, broadening unemployment insurance and modifying labor laws to enable collective bargaining in occupations like domestic and homecare workers and freelance workers. Such representation, the report notes, could come from traditional unions or worker advocacy groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Jobs With Justice and the Freelancers Union.

The researchers also recommend changes to tax laws that favor corporate spending on machines rather than workers.

Changing the tax code and labor laws is among the most politically controversial recommendations in the report. But the politics are not always predictable and may be changing, said David Rolf, founding president of Seattle-based Local 775 of the Service Employees International Union and a leader of the Fight for Fifteen campaign, the effort to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

President Donald Trump comfortably won Florida in this month’s election, but more than 60% of Florida voters approved a state constitutional amendment lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026, from its current level of $8.56.

Rolf, a member of the advisory board, said the report “pointed to the need for a different economic and legal framework.” And, he added, “that’s an important signal, coming from MIT.”

NEW YORK TIMES 2017 Amazon has made strides with automated conveyance systems and some robotics, like at this facility in Florence, N.J., but its warehouses run on human labor.