We Might Be All Wrong About Robots Taking Our Jobs

For those of us worried that robots are coming for our jobs, economist Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson offers words of comfort: Bots actually may create new employment opportunities. Brynjolfsson discussed how new technologies may influence future jobs in an interview (above) with Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, during the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. McAfee and Brynjolfsson are co-authors of The Second Machine Age. "It's true that robots are taking away some jobs, but at the same time they're creating lots of new jobs," said Brynjolfsson, director of the Initiative. "The thing that's different is whether or not the new job creation is keeping in balance with the old job creation, and there's no economic law that says that's automatically going to happen."