In his final speech as US president, Barack Obama warned of the “relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.” Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has said that governments will need to tax robots to replace forgone revenue when human workers lose their jobs.

If the past is prologue, these concerns are warranted.

In a recent study (pdf), economists Daren Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University try to quantify how worried we should be about robots. They examine the impact of industrial automation on the US labor market from 1990 to 2007. They conclude that each additional robot reduced employment in a given commuting area by 3–6 workers, and lowered overall wages by 0.25–0.5%.

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