IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 66

Feature
of the Robotic Industries Association, also shares
anecdotes of robots creating jobs [5]. The scale of
modern economies makes diagnosis and prediction
difficult, however, and debate revolves around
whether pockets of prosperity generated by robots
offset associated losses elsewhere.
The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,
which comprised economists, writers, technologists,
professors, and others, including two Nobel laureates,
stated that the combination of computerization
and robotics results in " the traditional link between
jobs and incomes ... being broken " [6]. Several decades
of prosperity followed for the average worker
in the United States, however, so it would seem
their analysis was flawed. One source of error was
that the committee overestimated the capabilities of
mid-20th-century robots. The futurist Ford [7] notes,
though, that the committee's predictions started to
be realized in the last two decades of the 20th century.
Examples are given as follows.
Declining participation in the labor force
The world's labor force participation rate steadily
declined from 1990, when it was 66%, to 61%
in 2019 [8].
Stagnant wages
From 1948 to 1973, productivity, which is the ratio
of gross domestic product (GDP) to hours worked,
and compensation grew at the same rate, but the latter
has since virtually flatlined [9]. See Figure 1 for
data from the United States.
Low share of national income going to labor
The proportion of the national dividend going to
workers was long thought to be a constant, but it is
falling. For example, in the United States, the share
went from 65% in 1948 to 58% in 2016 [10]. Economist
Charalampidis [11] calculated that automation
accounts for over half of this drop.
Job polarization
This term refers to jobs being concentrated at the
high and low ends of the wage spectrum. Job polarization
has been increasing since the 1980s, with
technology eliminating middle-skill jobs that involve
routine tasks. Employment losses in economic
downturns since then have come at the expense of
these jobs, and in the ensuing recoveries, they are
not restored [12]. An implication of polarization is
that the jobs most future workers find will be worse
than the ones available now [13]. The Rathenau
Instituut reports that during the past four decades,
automation has led to job polarization, referring to
both income and job security [14].
High inequality
Within country, wealth inequality has been rising
since 1980 [15]. In Italy, for example, 1995 saw
the poorest 50% of the population controlling 11.7%
of private wealth and the richest 0.1% having 5.5%,
but those positions had reversed by 2016: average
net wealth dropped 80% for the poorest half and
doubled for the richest 0.1%, meaning their shares
changed to 3.5% and 9.3%, respectively [16]. It has
been shown that while robot usage boosts productivity
and economic growth, it also widens inequality,
with " on average, a new robot displac[ing] nearly
twice as many jobs in lower-income regions compared
with higher-income regions of the same country "
[17]. Inequality is not just a problem for those
at the bottom; it negatively impacts an entire economy's
growth [18], [19].
Economists at Boston University and MIT discovFigure
1. Productivity and compensation
of U.S. workers relative to baseline [9].
66
ered that adding industrial robots in workplaces in
the United States has deleterious effects on jobs [20].
The results are strongest in the commuting zones in
which the robots are used because compensatory
effects such as cheaper goods mitigate the impacts
elsewhere, but adding industrial robots does depress
employment and wages even at the national level.
These effects, which are " concentrated in routine
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