A charted history of robot evolution A fun couple of charts plotting the history of robotics innovation from a new report by the Atlantic Council, with our thoughts below (click to enlarge): The report is a concise overview of both optimistic and pessimistic views of what the robotics technology will mean for the economy, and also of the societal issues that we discussed in last week's podcast with Illah Nourbakhsh. Robert Shapiro, citing the report, writes in a piece for the Daily Beast about some of the jobs that could soon be under threat from expected advances in robotics technology, and of course don't forget about Izzy's extensive coverage of same. But trying to cover these trends from a macro perspective can be frustrating. The anecdotal evidence that robotics will soon have a persistent, deleterious impact on even skilled middle-class jobs is both powerfully suggestive and plausible, perhaps best presented in the much-discussed Race Against the Machine. But it's stuff to address, in real time, questions about the importance of, say, robotics (and other) technology, versus a straightforward shortfall in demand vs sectoral shifts generally vs trade rebalancing issues vs Other Miscellaneous Stuff. We can look at a graph of the diverging capital vs labour share of income, but we're still left to wonder at the relative effects of cyclical vs secular forces, and even at the distinction between the two, which isn't always meaningful. And then there are second-order effects. If the robots do displace middle class jobs, then presumably the capitalist robot owners will have a lot of extra change lying around. The immediate impact is yet another surge in inequality. But presumably they'll be looking around to spend their surplus on something, and that something might be the goods and services of an industry that will hire the newly jobless to produce them. This is traditionally how technological displacement goes. Reasons for pessimism notwithstanding, it can't be entirely discounted that things will turn out this way again. We've also encountered similar problems trying to cover the earlier-hyped rebound in manufacturing jobs and the potential "reshoring" of jobs as productivity-adjusted wage differentials between the US and China become narrower. Consider that even classically cyclical sectors such as housing, in which productivity accelerations are historically rare, can be easy to misunderstand. Predictions about the future, etc... Anyways, just because we'll have to wait a while to know anything for sure is no reason to ignore the anecdotal evidence, or for that matter to refrain from speculating about the potential consequences of a big economic transformation. Best to be prepared and so forth.