Robots Are Stealing American Jobs, Consistent with MIT Economist [Robots]

Forget the recession, immigration and the mortgage industry collapse – in terms of loss of yankee jobs, robots are in charge .

That’s the belief of economists who have studied labor statistics and lengthening job polarization, a growing disparity in pay among low- and high-skilled jobs. A handful of studies from the spring and summer have picked up steam in recent weeks, and they raise some interesting questions on the economy inside the days leading up to Election Day.

Manufacturing remains to be strong in this country – it’s just that robots, not humans, are the ones manning the factories. If automation is the long run of manufacturing, medicine and other fields, less-educated Americans may well be left inside the dust.

David Autor , an MIT economist, found in a study this spring that certain occupations that include routine tasks are more liable to automation. (It’s a working paper, and he last updated it in August.)

The new issue of Good magazine

explains his findings bluntly: ” The middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.”

Autor’s study, conducted in collaboration with David Dorn of the heart for Monetary and monetary Studies in Madrid, classified tasks as routine or non-routine and graded occupations that involve those tasks. The Economist explains that secretaries, bank tellers and other clerks perform work which is highly routine, and thus at risk of automation and the loss of laborers. Jobs in this country are increasingly polarizing into high-skilled, high-paying jobs versus low-skilled, low-paying ones, and automation is a significant component, the study found.

A June study by European researchers also found the increased adoption of IT systems is driving the polarization. Industries that spent more on IT also saw the fastest increase well known for educated workers, and the sharpest drop well-known for less-skilled workers.

In examining these studies, both the Economist and Good magazine call out our beloved PR2′s laundry-folding and beer-fetching capabilities, noting that an army of domestic helper ‘bots could eliminate the will for low-skilled workers. And it’s an excellent question: When robots start doing dishes, washing our hair and even keeping tabs on our health, what is going to happen to domestic workers and hospice nurses?

That’s probably far off, as industrial robots still make up nearly all of automated laborers in this country. The recession has taken its toll on them, too: 2010 was the worst year for industrial robots since the 1980s, in step with the Fiscal Times .

Plus, robots can’t build themselves – yet – which means that we’ll need workers to position them together. Yes, roboticists are generally more educated than the remainder of the middle class, but this is viewed as a possibility. The Economist notes that for a few of the last century, people’s job prospects rose commensurate with their education. The longer term may have room for robots and folk, provided that we’re smart about it.

In any case, just be glad they’re not goats .

Popular Science is your wormhole to the long run. Reporting on what’s new and what’s next in science and technology, we deliver the longer term now.

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This post is tagged: european researchers, high paying jobs, interesting questions, mortgage industry, spring and summer