News Analysis: Robots to possibly bring severe repercussions to U.S. society - Xinhua

While industrial robots are predicted to replace millions of U.S. workers and suppress wage growth in the next decade, reforms in education and social safety net largely lag behind, said a renowned U.S. economist. "There's a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board," Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Axios Media, an American news website, in an interview published on Sunday night. Industrial robots have taken over routine work from human hands in the past several decades. A paper published in March by Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University, estimated that the U.S. had already lost between 360,000 and 670,000 jobs to robots since 1990. "Economists are trained to think of technology as always increasing employment and raising wages," said Acemoglu, "but there's no theoretical justification for believing this."