Reassuring News on Automation and Employment?
A recent study led by Melanie Arntz, acting head of the labor markets research department at the Center for European Economic Research,* addressed the specter of massive unemployment due to automation. It concluded that the risks of robots taking our jobs has been exaggerated. Looking forward 10-20 years, it revises downward the estimates of job losses in the U.S. from 38% to 9%. As we know, doomsayers (such as I) have forecast job losses more like 50% by 2040.
Here’s a link to the study, where you can download a free .pdf: Revisiting the Risk of Automation
The paper, released in July 2017, is chock-full of jargon and hairy statistical equations, but the thrust of it is commonsensical: scary scenarios of massive job losses** fail to take into account what the authors call “the substantial heterogeneity of tasks within occupations” [emphasis mine] “as well as the adaptability of jobs in the digital transformation.” (I take this language from the abstract, which nicely encapsulates the study and findings in the nine pages that follow.)
These findings stem from an approach that distinguishes between occupation-level work and job-level work.
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