Whose Jobs do the Robots Get?

Paul Krugman:

Izabella Kaminska has a thought-provoking piece on the real effects of technology on wages, in which she argues that much recent innovation, instead of displacing manual workers, has displaced high-paying skilled jobs. As it happens, I sort of predicted this 20 years ago, in a piece written for the Times magazine’s 100th anniversary (authors were asked to write as if it was 2096, and they were looking back.)

I argued then that menial work dealing with the physical world – gardeners, maids, nurses – would survive even as quite a few jobs that used to require college disappeared. As it turns out, big data has led to more progress in something that looks like artificial intelligence than I expected — self-driving cars are much closer to reality than I would have thought, and maybe gardening robots and post-Roomba robot cleaners will follow.

Lawyers, pathologists, translators are all getting heavily hit, but I suspect that robotics is getting much closer to being an equal unemployment opportunity. Many medium skill jobs like truck and taxi driver have less than ten years left, and fast food employees could well decimated soon too.

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