Will robots displace humans as motorised vehicles oust horses?

IN THE early 20th century the future seemed bright for horse employment. Within 50 years cars and tractors made short work of equine livelihoods. Some futurists see a cautionary tale for humanity in the fate of the horse: it was economically indispensable until it wasn’t.

The common retort to such concerns is that humans are far more cognitively adaptable than beasts of burden. Yet as robots grow more nimble, humans look increasingly vulnerable.

A new working paper concludes that, between 1990 and 2007, each industrial robot added per thousand workers reduced employment in America by nearly six workers. Humanity may not be sent out to pasture, but the parallel with horses is still uncomfortably close. Robots are just one small part of the technological wave squeezing people. The International Federation of Robotics defines industrial robots as machines that are automatically controlled and re-programmable; single-purpose equipment does not count. The worldwide population of such creatures is below 2m; America has slightly fewer than two robots per 1,000 workers (Europe has a bit more than two). But their numbers are growing, as is the range of tasks they can tackle, so findings of robot-driven job loss are worth taking seriously.

The paper’s authors, Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, are careful to exclude confounding causes as best they can. Their results are not driven by a few robot-intensive regions or industries, and are distinct from the effect of trade with China, or offshoring in general.

Increased robot density does not seem to raise employment among any group of workers, even those with university education. Since relatively few industrial robots are in use in the American economy, the total job loss from robotisation has been modest: between 360,000 and 670,000. By comparison, analysis published in 2016 found that trade with China between 1999 and 2011 may have left America with 2m fewer jobs than it would otherwise have had. Yet, if the China trade shock has largely run its course, the robot era is dawning.

The horses of instruction

Horses might have fared better had savings from mechanisation stayed in rural areas. Instead, soaring agricultural productivity led to falling food prices, lining the pockets of urban workers with more appetite for a new suit (or car) than anything four-legged. Similarly, the financial returns to automation flow to profitable firms and their shareholders, who not only usually live apart from the factories being automated but who save at high rates, contributing to weak demand across the economy as a whole. Indeed, roughly half of job losses from robotisation (as from exposure to Chinese imports) are attributable to the knock-on effect from reduced demand rather than direct displacement.

Today’s horses are not entirely without work. Some still find gainful employment; a few are very valuable indeed. For people to fare better, and retain more than a rump of work reserved for those of exceptional ability, they must prove a better match for clever machines than horses were for mechanical equipment. And societies should perhaps respond with more determination and care than horse-owners did a century ago.