Top AI economist who found ‘significant and disproportionate impact’ on entry-level jobs finds link between robots and minimum wage hikes

7 hours ago 7

Erik Brynjolfsson has spent the last several years building one of the most detailed empirical pictures of how technology is reshaping the American workforce—and the picture keeps getting darker for workers at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

Last August, the Stanford economist, who has been a thought leader on artificial intelligence (AI) for years, made headlines when he and his team published a first-of-its-kind study revealing the AI revolution was already having a “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market,” particularly young people ages 22 to 25 in white-collar fields like software engineering and customer service.

Now, in a new working paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research this February, Brynjolfsson and a team of co-authors have trained their lens on blue-collar America—and found minimum wage increases are accelerating the adoption of industrial robots on factory floors.

Taken together, the two papers trace the outlines of a labor market transformation that is squeezing workers from both ends: AI encroaching from the top, automation moving in from the bottom.