Small cities face greater impact from automation
© 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...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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The Royal Society
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134961 |
| _version_ | 1826206045787127808 |
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| author | Frank, Morgan R Sun, Lijun Cebrian, Manuel Youn, Hyejin Rahwan, Iyad |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Frank, Morgan R Sun, Lijun Cebrian, Manuel Youn, Hyejin Rahwan, Iyad |
| author_sort | Frank, Morgan R |
| collection | MIT |
| description | © 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:23:11Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/134961 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:23:11Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | The Royal Society |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1349612023-03-15T20:02:29Z Small cities face greater impact from automation Frank, Morgan R Sun, Lijun Cebrian, Manuel Youn, Hyejin Rahwan, Iyad Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society © 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. 2021-10-27T20:10:04Z 2021-10-27T20:10:04Z 2018 2019-07-25T15:48:24Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134961 en 10.1098/RSIF.2017.0946 Journal of the Royal Society Interface Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf The Royal Society The Royal Society |
| spellingShingle | Frank, Morgan R Sun, Lijun Cebrian, Manuel Youn, Hyejin Rahwan, Iyad Small cities face greater impact from automation |
| title | Small cities face greater impact from automation |
| title_full | Small cities face greater impact from automation |
| title_fullStr | Small cities face greater impact from automation |
| title_full_unstemmed | Small cities face greater impact from automation |
| title_short | Small cities face greater impact from automation |
| title_sort | small cities face greater impact from automation |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134961 |
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