Title
Small cities face greater impact from automation.
Abstract
The city has proved to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: how will automation affect employment in cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation across US urban areas. Small cities will undertake greater adjustments, such as worker displacement and job content substitutions. We demonstrate that large cities exhibit increased occupational and skill specialization due to increased abundance of managerial and technical professions. These occupations are not easily automatable, and, thus, reduce the potential impact of automation in large cities. Our results pass several robustness checks including potential errors in the estimation of occupational automation and subsampling of occupations. Our study provides the first empirical law connecting two societal forces: urban agglomeration and automation's impact on employment.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1098/rsif.2017.0946
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
Keywords
Field
DocType
city science,automation,future of work,resilience
Psychological resilience,Ecology,Economies of agglomeration,Biology,Automation,Urban agglomeration,Job content,Labour economics,Operations management
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
15
139
1742-5689
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.76
3
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Morgan R. Frank11578.36
Lijun Sun2173.98
Manuel Cebrián338738.52
HyeJin Youn472.30
Iyad Rahwan5134690.64