Are Robots Going to Steal Our Jobs?

Many technologists think so, but economists aren’t so easily convinced.
 

- Ronald Bailey

“The realtity is that we are facing a jobless future: one in which most of the work done by humans will be done by machines. Robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods, and do our chores, but there won’t be much work for human beings.” That’s the dire warning of software entrepreneur and Car negie Mellon engineer Vivek Wadhwa.

Former Microsoft ceo Bill Gates agrees: Technology “will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set,” he has predicted. Gates has also proposed taxing robots to support the victims of technological unemployment. “In the past,” software entrepreneur Martin Ford declared last year, “machines have always been tools that have been used by people.” But now, he fears, they’re “becoming a replacement or a substitute for more and more workers.” A much-cited 2013 study from the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment struck an even more dire note, estimating that 47 percent of today’s American jobs are at risk of being automated within the next two decades.

The conventional wisdom among technologists is well established: Robots are going to eat our jobs. But economists tend to have a different perspective.

Over the past two centuries, they point out, automation has brought us lots more jobs—and higher living standards too. “Is this time different?” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor said in a lecture last year. “Of course this time is different; every time is different. On numerous occasions in the last 200 years scholars and activists have raised the alarm that we are running out of work and making ourselves obsolete....These predictions strike me as arrogant.”