It looks like we’re already losing our jobs to robots.
A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research examined the impact of robots in the workforce between 1990 and 2007.
It found that one robot in the workforce led to the loss of 6.2 jobs within a commuting zone where local people travel to work, Recode reports.
The robots also reduce wages, with one robot per thousand workers leading to a wage decline of between 0.25 % and 0.5 %.
The study was produced by the economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, who used a model where robots and humans competed against each other.
Acemoglu and Restrepo focused on local labor markets in the U.S. for their empirical research.
The study says that the number of robots in the U.S. is limited but has contributed to the loss of between 360,000 to 670,000 jobs. It warns that with more robots coming online, the future impact could be “much more sizable”.
