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by stymaar 27 days ago
That's econ 101. But that doesn't mean that's what happened in the real world.

The thing is you won't be able to name a single industry for which automation has had a significant impact on labor productivity during the 2000-2020.

The US lost almost half of its manufacturing jobs in the 2000s and it has pretty much nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with businesses moving their production abroad.

Robots can have a huge impact in the coming decades, but you can't argue that they had negligible impact on the past two decades.