A decade ago, industrial robots assisted workers in their tasks. Now workers—those who remain—assist the robots in theirs.
For decades, the conventional view among economists was that technological advances create as many opportunities for workers as they take away. In the past several years, however, research has begun to suggest otherwise. “It’s not that we’re running out of work or jobs per se,” David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who studies the impact of automation on employment, said. “But a subset of people with low skill levels may not be able to earn a reasonable standard of living based on their labor. We see that already.” As automation depresses wages, jobs in factories become both less abundant and less appealing.
This process, Autor and other economists argue, can also exacerbate inequality. The labor market is built around the idea of labor scarcity: each person has a bundle of labor—his or her own capacity to work—that employers need and that she can sell in the job market through employment during the course of a career of thirty years or so. That model is eroding. “It doesn’t mean there’s no money around, but it’s just accruing to the owners of capital, to the owners of ideas,” Autor says. “And capital is less equitably distributed than labor. Everyone is born with some labor, but not everyone is born with capital.”
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Originally Posted by ClydeR
