How Many Robots Does It Take to Replace a Human Job?

Last week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he wasn't worried at all about advancing artificial intelligence taking over jobs anytime soon. In fact, he said, he wouldn't be worried about it for for another 50 to 100 years. As I wrote recently, many experts would disagree with the notion that displacement--or at the very least, shifts--in the labor market due to automation are that far afield. Recent studies from McKinsey and the economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne estimate that around 45 percent of workers currently perform tasks that could be automated in the near future. And the World Bank estimates that around 57 percent of jobs could be automated within the next 20 years.