Maria Petrova, Gregor Schubert, Bledi Taska, and Pinar Yildirim
When policymakers discuss the impact of new technologies on workers, the conversation typically centers on two questions: How many jobs will be lost, and what will happen to wages? While these are useful starting points, a growing body of research suggests that technology’s effects on workers extend well beyond these immediate employment and earnings outcomes. Robotization and AI, in particular, stand to reshape the entire career trajectories of workers.
The economic consequences of technological change on work have been extensively studied: Research has found that computers changed the demand for different skills, with routine tasks particularly vulnerable to displacement. This task displacement due to automation has been shown to increase wage inequality in the U.S. Individual firms that adopt robots have been found to expand their overall employment and to become more productive, but this may come at the expense of competitors or production workers within the adopting firms that are replaced by the technology. As a result, the adoption of industrial robots in particular has been linked to significant job losses and wage declines in U.S. labor markets between 1990 and 2007.
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