We May Not Know When Automation Will Take Over, but the Anxiety Is Already Here

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. In an interview last year, Treasury Secretary Steven Munchin told Axios that job automation was "not even on our radar screen," citing that the risk was still "50-100 more years away." But even if an employment apocalypse doesn't come to pass, fear of an automated future may be making Americans sicker today, according to a study published recently in the journal of Social Science and Medicine that shows a correlation between automation risk and worsened physical and mental health at the county level. The researchers, who are from Ball State University and Villanova University, used a regression analysis of county-level data about health and the share of total jobs at risk of automation. They calculated the second data set by matching county-level employment data with the risk levels calculated in a frequently cited 2013 Oxford University study that suggested almost 50 percent of jobs could be at risk of automation by 2033.