The robots are coming, and they're looking for jobs

The robots are coming, and they are looking for work. Although I reported last April on one observer's contention that the increased adoption of robotics in manufacturing could actually increase jobs, another pundit now sees robots and related technologies as a threat to high-skilled and low-skilled workers alike.

That pundit is the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. In a recent interview with Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider, he commented on the role of robots and driverless vehicles and similar technologies. He noted that inequality has been increasing since the 1980s, with a divergence in wages occurring between low- and high-skilled workers. But beginning around 2000, the competition shifted, he said—it's no longer between high- and low-skilled labor but between capital and labor in general, and the capital to invest in technologies like robotics is winning.

The New York Times' Catherine Rampell, an economics reporter and theater critic, reinforced Krugman's comments in the Sunday paper. She paraphrased Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at MIT and co-author of the book Race Against the Machine, as saying, “Any job that can be reduced to an algorithm will be, leading to the displacement of workers in industries as diverse as retail and radiology.”

But it's not time to ease up on acquiring skills. Writing in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson made the case for education, noting that the unemployment rate for bachelor's-degree holders is 3.7%, vs. 8.1% for high-school graduates with no college education and 12% for those who have not completed high school. As Thompson noted, “Bachelor's degrees correlate with more, better-paid jobs, and three out of five workers today don't have one.”

Unfortunately it doesn't follow that increasing the percentage of workers with college educations will cause more jobs to become available.

The good news? As Rampell put it with regard to the encroaching robots, “That’s not to say there will be no new jobs to fill the void: we can scarcely imagine the industries and occupations that will flower as the economy adjusts, just as prior deep thinkers could not have conceived of today’s nanophysicists or social media consultants.”

Click here for a related post on the history and social implications of “android anxiety.”