The Robots Really Did Take People's Jobs, Study Confirms

Industrial robots have had "large and robust negative effects" on employment and wages, a new paper shows.

By
Cora Lewis
by Cora Lewis

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Sam Panthaky / AFP / Getty Images

Every new robot added to an American factory in recent decades reduced employment in the surrounding area by 6.2 workers, according to a new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Researchers worked to separate the impact of robots from other big-picture economic trends that hit the US workforce in the same period, like imports from China and Mexico, computer software replacing office work, and offshoring. With all that taken into account, they estimated that for every one robot per thousands workers in a given area of the country, the employment rate went down by .2-.3 percentage points, and wages fell by between .25 and .5 percent.

"We see negative effects of robots on essentially all occupations, with the exception of managers," wrote economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University in the study. "Predictably, the major categories experiencing substantial declines are routine manual occupations, blue-collar workers, operators and assembly workers, and machinists and transport workers."

Geoff Caddick / AFP / Getty Images

The authors found smaller, but still negative effects on employment and wages in construction, business services, and retail.

According to estimates from the International Federation of Robotics, there are currently between 1.5 and 1.75 million industrial robots in operation, a number that could increase to 4 to 6 million by 2025, with the majority in the auto industry and electronics industry.

The paper focused exclusively on fully autonomous machines that don't require human operators and that can be programmed to perform tasks — such as welding, assembling, handling materials, or packaging. (Elevators and coffee makers don't qualify as industrial robots, for example, because they can't be reprogrammed and they require human operation.)

"We view our paper as a first step in a comprehensive evaluation of how robots will affect, and are already affecting, the labor market equilibrium," the authors wrote, adding that the findings are "somewhat surprising, especially because they indicate a very limited set of offsetting employment increases in other industries and occupations."

Other perspectives on this story

  • 1
    1/8
    “The less people work the less taxes people pay so unless they take that money lost from the company which is doubtful how can this work in the long run? Government get richer companies get richer and citizens get poorer or we get free money? People with no jobs won't be able to buy the things robots and companies make”
  • 2
    2/8
    Admitting that robots currently replace menial, repetitive jobs:
    “My fear is that drudgery will be replaced by desperation, starvation, and violent revolution.”
  • 3
    3/8
    “Had an interesting convo about automatic checkouts the other day. I think it's likely past time to really push people to understand that as tech evolves, their job may end. Someone commented on this article suggesting a global basic living wage- but I think we need to think about offering free- or lower cost further education to promote further learning to allow for job sector changes in the event that your job ends for any reason.”
  • 4
    4/8
    “This is the danger of a service economy. Having an economy built around catering to the needs of manufacturing workers means replacing a single manufacturing worker sends shockwaves throughout the entire economy.”
  • 5
    5/8
    “So yeah, we lose jobs in Detroit, gain jobs in Washington. The economy is big--it's the size of the whole world, in fact, and will continue to be so until we expand into space colonization. Localized effects don't tell the whole story.”
  • 6
    6/8
    “automation is one of many tools that allow wealth to concentrate into the hands of a very select few...the wealthy do not purchase enough goods relative to their income to drive the economy...Luddites understand these two knowns and their call to action is entirely well founded. Their choice of action (to preserve labor-heavy methods of production) is clearly wrong, but dismissing their claim entirely is a recipe for disaster.”
  • 7
    7/8
    “This is why protectionism won't work to save American factory jobs. Trump, HRC & Bernie all lied about trade agreements being main culprit.”
  • 8
    8/8
    Robots should do drudgery work:
    “...so that people could be more productive and spend time actually creating #halffullglass”

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