Economist says robots will take over a million more jobs in the next 10-yrs

Renowned US economist Daron Acemoglu has warned that robots are about to take over a million more jobs from human hands in the next decade.

Acemoglu made the statement even as robots have already displaced hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. since 1990.

“There’s a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board,” the economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Axios Media, an American news website, in an interview published on Sunday night.

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Industrial robots have been replacing a range of low-skill and medium-skill occupations. A paper published in March by Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, another MIT economist, estimates that the U.S. has already lost between 360,000 and 670,000 jobs to robots since 1990.

In an aggressive scenario, Acemoglu estimates in the paper that industrial robots will lead to a 0.94-1.76 percentage points lower employment to population ratio and 1.3-2.6 percent lower wage growth between 2015 and 2025, indicating millions of workers could lose their jobs in the next decade.

 

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