In recent months, anthropologists have been rummaging through the grassroots of America’s workforce jungle in search of an answer to one of the great questions of our time: what happens to human jobs when robots arrive?
You might expect the answer to be very depressing. If there is one thing on which almost all economists agree, it is that digital technologies are performing many jobs once done by humans.
Manufacturing offers a particularly stark example of this. A study by Ball State university suggests that 5.6m US manufacturing jobs were lost between 2000 and 2010 — almost nine in 10 thanks to automation, not trade. It could be worse: McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that 45 per cent of the tasks currently done by humans could be automated as the pattern spreads into the service sector. This equates to $2tn in annual wages — and millions of jobs.