If you earn less than $20/hour, there’s an 83 percent probability that automation will take over your job at some point in the future, according to a new report issued last week by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).
If you earn between $20 and $40 per hour, the chance of your being replace by a robot drop to only 31 percent. And workers earning more than $40 per hour have virtually no chance of being replaced by an automaton worker, according to the report.
More Money, Less Problems
In fact, those lucky enough to be in the highest hourly income bracket will find their work “complemented and improved” by workplace automation, according to the report.
The data on wage and automation was only a small part of a comprehensive report the economists send to the President each year, but it it offered a rather alarming outlook for many hourly workers.
Don’t Fear the Robots
But there’s little reason to be concerned because workers displaced by automation typically find new employment, often with better jobs, the economists said.
“One view is that robots will take substantial numbers of jobs away from humans, leaving them technologically unemployed — either in blissful leisure or, in many popular accounts, suffering from the lack of a job,” the report states. “Most economists consider either scenario unlikely because several centuries of innovation have shown that, even as machines have been able to increasingly do tasks humans used to do, this leads humans to have higher incomes, consume more, and creates jobs for almost everyone who wants one.
“In other words, as workers have historically been displaced by technological innovations, they have moved into new jobs, often requiring more complex tasks or greater levels of independent judgement,” the economists said.
A New Economic Revolution?
Today’s fast-moving technological developments in robotics and automation are similar to the transformation the nation’s labor force underwent during the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th Century. Technological advancements in agricultural tools forced farm workers to find new work in urban factories.
The use of industrial robots more than doubled between2010 and 2014, according to the CEA report. In 2012, the US had an average of 135 robots for every 10,000 workers, lagging behind more automated countries like Japan and Germany but ahead of China, the world’s second-largest economy after the US.
Differing Opinions
Workers don’t need to fear automation, but should instead embrace it, according to the president’s economic advisers. A 2015 research paper cited in the report found that higher levels of automation within an industry typically leads to higher overall wages.
But another way of interpreting this data is that the higher wages are due to robots pushing the lowest-paid workers out of the industry, pushing the average wage higher.