![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2017\/03\/28\/upshot\/29up-robots1\/29up-robots1-master768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWho is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they\u2019ve declared a different winner: the robots.<\/p>\n
The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper<\/a> by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year<\/a>, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts.<\/p>\n But that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data \u2014 and suggests a more pessimistic future. The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward \u2014 especially blue-collar men without college degrees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe conclusion is that even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and it\u2019s going to take a very long time for these communities to recover,\u201d Mr. Acemoglu said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019ve worked in Detroit for 10 years, you don\u2019t have the skills to go into health care,\u201d he said. \u201cThe market economy is not going to create the jobs by itself for these workers who are bearing the brunt of the change.\u201d<\/p>\n The paper\u2019s evidence of job displacement from technology contrasts with a comment from the Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who said at an Axios event last week that artificial intelligence\u2019s displacement of human jobs was \u201cnot even on our radar screen,\u201d and \u201c50 to 100 more years\u201d away. (Not all robots use artificial intelligence, but a panel of experts \u2014 polled by the M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy in reaction to Mr. Mnuchin\u2019s comments \u2014 expressed the same broad concern<\/a> of major job displacement.)<\/p>\n The paper also helps explain a mystery that has been puzzling economists: why, if machines are replacing human workers, productivity hasn\u2019t been increasing. In manufacturing, productivity has been increasing more than elsewhere<\/a> \u2014 and now we see evidence of it in the employment data, too.<\/p>\n The study analyzed the effect of industrial robots in local labor markets in the United States. Robots are to blame for up to 670,000 lost manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2007, it concluded, and that number will rise because industrial robots are expected to quadruple.<\/p>\n The paper adds to the evidence that automation, more than other factors like trade and offshoring that President Trump campaigned on, has been the bigger long-term threat<\/a> to blue-collar jobs. The researchers said the findings \u2014 \u201clarge and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages\u201d \u2014 remained strong even after controlling for imports, offshoring, software that displaces jobs, worker demographics and the type of industry.<\/p>\n