Automation will make megacities grow way faster

Robots and artificial intelligence are set to cause massive upheaval in the labor market, and that will naturally have a dramatic impact on where workers choose to live. We recently described the work of Iyad Rahwan, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab who claims that smaller cities will feel the greatest impact of automation. His study concludes that larger cities have a disproportionate number of jobs that require cognitive and analytical tasks, while smaller cities have a disproportionate amount of routine clerical work. That means the latter suffer more from the arrival of machines in the workplace. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Rahwan explained how that will spur the growth of megacities.