New AI and robotics technologies are increasingly automating work tasks. How much of a threat does automation pose to workers? A new study by one of us (James Bessen), along with Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, and Wiljan van den Berge, provides the first large-scale quantitative evidence of how automation affects individual workers, using government data from 2000-2016 for 36,000 firms in the Netherlands, covering about 5 million workers each year.
Research: Automation Affects High-Skill Workers More Often, but Low-Skill Workers More Deeply
A new study confirms that automation does indeed affect many workers. Each year, about 9% of the workers in the sample are employed at firms that make major investments in automation. Yet relatively few workers are adversely affected. Only about 2% of tenured workers at automating firms leave the year of the automation event as a result of automation; after five years, 8.5% will have left, cumulatively. Nevertheless, those who do leave suffer significant economic costs, largely due to spells of unemployment. Surprisingly, this burden falls more frequently on highly-educated and highly-paid workers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, they are more likely to leave as a result of automation, although they also seem to find new jobs faster. In other words, highly-paid workers are more commonly affected, but the effects are more severe for less well-paid workers.