Small cities face greater impact from automation
Name
rsif.2017.0946.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.29 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7850b83562f1a569372626667b28feeb
Author(s)
Frank, Morgan R
Sun, Lijun
Cebrian, Manuel
Youn, Hyejin
Rahwan, Iyad
Date Issued
2018
Journal
Journal of the Royal Society Interface
Publisher
The Royal Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2018 The Authors. The city has proved to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: how will automation affect employment in cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation across US urban areas. Small cities will undertake greater adjustments, such as worker displacement and job content substitutions. We demonstrate that large cities exhibit increased occupational and skill specialization due to increased abundance of managerial and technical professions. These occupations are not easily automatable, and, thus, reduce the potential impact of automation in large cities. Our results pass several robustness checks including potential errors in the estimation of occupational automation and subsampling of occupations. Our study provides the first empirical law connecting two societal forces: urban agglomeration and automation’s impact on employment.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1098/RSIF.2017.0946
