Technology is transformative, and with the rapid pace of change, workers might wonder: Are robots going to help me or take my job? Robots have already transformed industries from health care to manufacturing and have catalyzed important questions about the future of work. This blog post unpacks how economists examine this issue and recent research suggesting that, though the effects of automation are complex, some groups of workers will be disproportionately impacted.
In this blog post, we focused on robots that can interact with the physical world rather than artificial intelligence chatbots, like ChatGPT. Robots can be augmented by artificial intelligence, or AI, but they can also be designed to work based on classical computer engineering principles.