No, AI Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs

Instead, they will boost productivity, lower prices and spur the evolution of the labor market

By Robert D. Atkinson. He is president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Excerpts:

"In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of Oxford University produced a research paper estimating that 47% of U.S. employment was at risk of being eliminated by new technologies."

"humans have experienced technological disruptions before, and we adapted to meet them."

"In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of men and boys across America worked as pinsetters in bowling alleys."

"In the 1920s and ’30s, elevator companies began installing “robot elevators” with automatic controls, and eventually elevator operators all but disappeared."

"the decline of agricultural field workers due to motorized tractors to the rise and fall of “motion picture projectionists,” who operated projectors in movie theaters. Entire categories of jobs were wiped out, yet automation has never created a mass lumpenproletariat."

"AI doomsayers frequently succumb to what economists call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the idea that there is a limited amount of work to be done, and if a job is eliminated, it’s gone for good."

"the saving from increased productivity is recycled back into the economy in the form of higher wages, higher profits and reduced prices. This creates new demand that in turn creates new jobs."

"According to Goldman Sachs Research economists, broad adoption of AI could boost the country’s productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points per year."

"about 20 million U.S. workers are fired or laid off every year. In other words, the supposed AI job apocalypse, if it occurred, would be the equivalent of only about six weeks of normal labor-market churn."