The robot story just won't go away. No one disagrees that technology can hurt some workers in the short term. Some jobs become obsolete. The issue is whether over the longer term technology leads to an overall loss of jobs. A recent paper by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo has contributed to the debate with evidence that robots are to blame for the loss of up to 670,000 US jobs between 1990 and 2007. A few things Acemoglu and Restrepo didn't mention in their paper:
- During roughly the same period, over 24 million new US jobs were created.
- Between 2015-2025, an expected 2 million US manufacturing jobs are expected to go unfilled because employers can't find qualified workers, even though most employers are willing to pay more than the going market rate for skilled production workers.
- Other countries, including Germany and South Korea, have added far more industrial robots per worker than the US over the same time period and yet have lost fewer manufacturing jobs than we have.
- Labor productivity has fallen dramatically in the past decade, meaning that automation and other labor-saving technology have not been a value proposition for many employers (note that the Acemoglu and Restrepostudy covers only up to 2007).
- Due to an aging population and low fertility rate, many economists anticipate a prolonged period of tight labor markets in the US and other developed counties over the next several decades. In fact, manufacturing employers cite the retirement of baby boomers as the biggest contributor to anticipated labor shortages.
The losers in this equation are unskilled workers. Thanks to robots and other forms of advanced automation, production workers need skills in programming, problem-solving, and math. And you don't get those skills with just a high school diploma.