Since the meme of robots and AI destroying our jobs is so pervasive that even inevitably on this forum it's pretty much taken for gospel, I thought this piece might be of interest
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/th ... s-industry
"...The endless scare stories of robots taking all the jobs, or the threat of automation, fit this model. While this is a recurring theme in major media outlets, it basically makes zero sense.
Replacing human labor with technology is a very old story. It’s called “productivity growth.” We’ve been seeing it pretty much as long as we have had a capitalist economy. In fact, this is what allows for sustained improvements in living standards. If we had not seen massive productivity growth in agriculture, then the bulk of the country would still be working on farms. Otherwise, we would be going hungry.
However, thanks to a massive improvement in technology, less than 2 percent of our workforce is now employed in agriculture. And, we can still export large amounts of food.
If the robots taking our jobs industry were around a hundred years ago, it would be warning about gas-powered tractors eliminating the need for farm labor. We would be hearing serious sounding discussion on our radio shows (we will steal radios from the 1919 future) with leading experts warning about how pretty soon there would be no work for anyone. They would tell us we have to prepare for this dark future by fundamentally reorganizing society.
Okay, that story is about as wrong as could possibly be the case, but if anyone buys the robots taking our jobs line, then they better try to figure out why this time is different. After all, what difference does it make if a worker loses their job to a big tractor or they lose their job to a robot?
The basic story of robots taking our jobs is one of a massive increase in productivity growth. Instead of people driving taxis and trucks, stocking store shelves, and working checkout counters, all this work and more will be dealt with by robots. There are three problems with this story:
It has not been happening;
No one involved in designing policy expects it to happen;
It would likely mean more rapid wage growth and improved living standards if it did happen.
On the first point, instead of accelerating to new highs, the rate of productivity growth has actually been very slow in recent years. We did have a period of strong productivity growth from 1995 to 2005 when the average annual rate was just under 3.0 percent. However, this period of strong growth ended abruptly in 2006 for reasons that are not well understood.
Since 2006, productivity growth has fallen to less than a 1.3 percent annual rate. While some (including me) had hoped that a tighter labor market would lead to a pickup in productivity growth, to date we are still not seeing it. Over the last two years, productivity growth has averaged less than 1.2 percent.[1] Long and short, there is absolutely zero evidence that we are seeing any mass displacement by robots, automation, or anything else.
[...]
We could look at other projections from places like the OECD and I.M.F. and other organizations, but they all show pretty much the same story. None of them show the massive uptick in productivity growth that would be associated with the robots taking all the jobs.
This doesn’t mean such an upturn is impossible after all these organizations all missed the slowdown that began in 2006 and for that matter the upturn that began in 1995. So their track record in projecting trends in productivity has not been great, but anyone arguing the robots-taking-all-the-jobs-story should realize that they are going against the consensus in the economics profession.
The last point is that if the robots did start taking more jobs, so what? We had almost 3.0 percent productivity growth from 1995 to 2005 and in the much longer post World War II Golden age from 1947 to 1973. These were periods of relatively low unemployment and strong wage growth.
..."
The entire piece is a bit longer but worth reading. And I think the basic argument is pretty strong: if the highly productive machines are suddenly eating our jobs, then where's the evidence? And since machines have replaced human labor for centuries now, why aren't we all unemployed?