Earn Less Than $20 An Hour? Look Out For Robots
There is an 83 percent chance that artificial intelligence will eventually takeover positions that pay low-wages, says White House’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).
A new report suggests that those who are paid less than $20 an hour will be unemployed and see their jobs filled by robots over the next few years.
But for workers who earn more than $20 an hour there is only a 31 percent chance and those paid double have just a 4 percent risk.
To reach these numbers the CEA’s 2016 economic report referred to a 2013 study about the ‘automation of jobs performed by Oxford researchers that assigned a risk of automation to 702 different occupations’.
Those jobs were then matched to a wage that determines the worker’s risk of having their jobs taken over by a robot.
‘The median probability of automation was then calculated for three ranges of hourly wage: less than 20 dollars; 20 to 40 dollars; and more than 40 dollars,’ reads the report.
The risk of having your job taken over by a robot, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman told reporters Monday, ‘varies enormously based on what your salary is.’
A majority of the economists believe that this scenario is unlikely because, even though robots have taken over low-wage jobs in the past, those human workers were pushed up into higher paying jobs that require more complex thinking and skills – things robots are unable to do.
Worldwide shipments of robotics has doubled from 2010 to 2014 to a total of 229,000, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
And in the 2012 report, the US had about 135 robots for every 10,000 workers, which was far behind Japan and Germany but ahead of China.