A New Way To Understand Automation

For one of the most distinguished critics of automation, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu has been, ironically, cranking out research on the subject lately like he's a machine. He and his co-author Pascual Restrepo have produced so many studies on the subject that he couldn't tell us how many they've done. "I've lost count," he says. Their conveyer belt of research has been spitting out some startling facts. They find, for instance, that each new industrial robot killed, on average, 3.3 jobs in America between 1993 and 2007.