ABSTRACT

Any account of how the different aspects of work and employment has been changed by technological automation and advanced robotics would be rudimentary. The fields of advanced robotics and accelerating artificial intelligence promise not only profound economic disruption, but a technological tsunami at the level of work, employment and unemployment. This chapter examines how this world of automated work has become embedded in the global economy and some of its major social, economic and political consequences. Robotics impacts employment fields such as healthcare, retail, education, construction and many other employment sectors in the developed world. For the sceptics, the mantra of “no significant change” holds good. Robotics may be sweeping through industries and enterprises, but it is not revolutionary. Other sceptics take a somewhat different tack, and seek to establish a systematic empirical test for assessing the economic impacts of robotics.