Economists used new methods to examine how many U.S. jobs have been lost to machine automation, and how many have been created as technology leads to new tasks. On net, and particularly since 1980, technology has replaced more U.S. jobs than it has generated. Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT; iStock
“There does appear to be a faster rate of automation, and a slower rate of augmentation, in the last four decades, from 1980 to the present, than in the four decades prior,” says Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results. To determine this, Autor and his colleagues combed through about 35,000 job categories listed in the U.S. Census Bureau reports, tracking how they emerge over time. They also used natural language processing tools to analyze the text of every U.S. patent filed since 1920. The research examined how words were “embedded” in the census and patent documents to unearth related passages of text. That allowed them to determine links between new technologies and their effects on employment.
Ultimately, the research suggests that the negative effects of automation on employment were more than twice as great in the 1980-2018 period as in the 1940-1980 period. There was a more modest, and positive, change in the effect of augmentation on employment in 1980-2018, as compared to 1940-1980.