Research: Automation Affects High-Skill Workers More Often, but Low-Skill Workers More Deeply

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. We found 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.