Technological evolution over the past decades has dramatically reshaped income distribution across America's workforce, benefiting highly educated professionals while simultaneously eroding middle-class opportunities. However, today's artificial intelligence and robotics innovations don't necessarily signal the end of middle-tier or lower-wage employment. In fact, these technological advances generate new job opportunities alongside transforming existing ones. With strategic policies in place, more individuals can secure rewarding careers as AI and automation continue to revolutionize workplaces.
This conclusion emerges from the comprehensive report by MIT's Task Force on the Work of the Future, synthesizing over two years of in-depth research on AI's impact on employment. The report, titled "The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines," was recently released, with the task force hosting the online "AI & the Future of Work Congress" to discuss its findings.
Central to the task force's discoveries: an imminent robot-driven employment catastrophe isn't looming. As technology eliminates certain positions, it simultaneously creates fresh opportunities; approximately 63% of jobs existing in 2018 were nonexistent in 1940. Rather than experiencing a sudden robotic takeover, we're observing a gradual technological integration in workplaces. The critical question revolves around enhancing job quality—particularly for middle- and lower-wage workers—and ensuring more equitable prosperity than America has witnessed in recent decades.
"The sky isn't falling, but it's gradually descending," notes David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, associate head of MIT's Department of Economics, and task force co-chair. "We must respond proactively. Our world is transforming in profoundly significant ways, and maintaining our current trajectory will inevitably lead to unfavorable outcomes."
This proactive approach begins with a realistic understanding of technological transformation, according to task force leaders.
The task force sought "to move beyond sensationalized predictions about emerging technologies, focusing instead on practical strategies to advance worker interests in our AI-driven economy," explains Elisabeth Beck Reynolds, executive director of both the task force and the MIT Industrial Performance Center. "We examined multiple industries and analyzed the diverse factors—social, cognitive, organizational, and economic—that influence how companies implement AI and automation technologies."
"We aim to introduce a more sophisticated perspective into public discourse about technology and employment," adds David Mindell, task force co-chair, professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT. "It's not about robots arriving tomorrow with no recourse. Technology represents the culmination of human choices and decisions."
The report also explores why Americans might feel anxious about work and the future. It states: "When innovation fails to generate opportunity, it breeds tangible fear about the future—the concern that technological advancement will enrich the nation while endangering people's livelihoods. This fear carries substantial costs: political and regional divisions, institutional distrust, and skepticism toward innovation itself. The economic history of the past four decades validates these concerns."
"Artificial intelligence and automation are transforming our work, lives, and society," observes MIT President L. Rafael Reif, who established the task force in 2017. "Fortunately, the severe societal consequences that concern us all aren't inevitable. How we design tomorrow's technologies—and the policies and practices surrounding them—will profoundly shape their impact."
Reif continues: "Addressing this challenge effectively ranks among our era's most crucial and inspiring missions—and should be prioritized by everyone who benefits from a healthy, stable society that offers opportunity for all."
Six Key Findings
The task force, comprising MIT scholars and researchers from across the Institute, devoted over two years to examining work and technology. Their final report presents six comprehensive conclusions and policy recommendations:
1) Technological advancement concurrently replaces existing work and creates new employment opportunities. It isn't eliminating work entirely.
Over recent decades, technology has dramatically transformed numerous workplaces, particularly through digitization and automation, which have displaced clerical, administrative, and assembly-line workers nationwide. However, the overall percentage of adults in paid employment has generally increased for over a century. Theoretically, the report asserts, there exists "no inherent conflict between technological change, full employment, and rising wages."
In reality, however, technology has polarized the economy. White-collar professionals—in medicine, marketing, design, research, and other fields—have become more productive and affluent, while middle-tier workers have fallen behind. Meanwhile, lower-paying service industry jobs where digitization has minimal impact—such as food services, janitorial work, and driving—have expanded. Since 1978, aggregate U.S. productivity has increased by 66%, while compensation for production and nonsupervisory workers has risen by only 10%. Wage disparities also persist across racial and gender lines, and cities no longer provide the economic "escalator" to the middle class they once did.
While innovations have replaced many receptionists, clerks, and assembly-line workers, they've simultaneously created new professions. Since the mid-20th century, the U.S. has experienced substantial growth in the computer industry, renewable energy, medical specialties, and various design, engineering, marketing, and healthcare fields. These industries can also support numerous middle-income positions, while the service sector continues expanding.
As task force leaders state in the report, "The dynamic interaction among task automation, innovation, and new work creation, while consistently disruptive, represents a fundamental source of increasing productivity. Innovation enhances the quantity, quality, and variety of work a person can accomplish within a given timeframe. This rising productivity, in turn, enables improved living standards and the flourishing of human endeavors."
However, the authors somewhat regretfully note that "in what should be a virtuous cycle, increasing productivity provides society with resources to invest in those whose livelihoods are disrupted by the evolving structure of work."
But this hasn't materialized, as the distribution of value from these jobs has been uneven. In the U.S., lower-skill positions pay only 79% as much when compared to Canada, 74% compared to the U.K., and 57% compared to Germany.
"People recognize that automation can enrich the nation while impoverishing them, and that they aren't sharing in those gains," Autor observes. "We believe this can be remedied."
2) The profound impacts of technological change are unfolding gradually.
Repeatedly, media coverage about technology and employment focuses on dramatic scenarios where robots replace humans, leading to a future without work.
But this narrative overlooks a fundamental reality: Technologies that mimic human actions are challenging to develop and costly to implement. It's generally more economical to simply hire people for these tasks. Conversely, technologies that enhance human capabilities—like tools enabling doctors to make diagnoses—help these workers become more productive. Beyond clerical and assembly-line positions, many technologies function alongside workers rather than replacing them.
Therefore, workplace technology typically involves "augmenting tasks more than replacing them," Mindell explains. The task force report examines technology adoption across industries including insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and autonomous vehicles, identifying growth in "narrow" AI systems that complement workers. Meanwhile, technologists are addressing complex challenges like improving robotic dexterity, which could lead to more direct worker replacement, but such advanced developments remain further in the future.
"That's what technological adoption looks like," Mindell states. "It's uneven, sporadic, progressing in fits and starts." The critical question is how innovators at MIT and elsewhere can shape new technology to benefit society broadly.
3) Increasing labor productivity hasn't resulted in widespread income growth because societal institutions and labor market policies have deteriorated.
While the U.S. has experienced considerable technological innovation in recent decades, it hasn't seen comparable policy innovation, particularly benefiting workers. The polarizing effects of technology on employment would be mitigated if middle- and lower-income workers received better support through other means. Instead, regarding compensation, working conditions, termination notice periods, paid vacation time, sick leave, and family leave, "less-educated and low-paid U.S. workers fare worse than comparable workers in other wealthy industrialized nations," the report notes. The adjusted gross hourly earnings of lower-skill workers in the U.S. in 2015 averaged $10.33, compared to $24.28 in Denmark, $18.18 in Germany, and $17.61 in Australia.
"It's unsustainable for the labor market to have this growing disparity without shared prosperity," Autor argues. "We need to restore the synergy between rising productivity and improvements in labor market opportunities." He adds: "We've experienced genuine institutional failure, and addressing it lies within our power. ... This encompasses worker representation, minimum wages, portable benefits, and incentives encouraging companies to invest in workers."
Looking forward, the report warns, "If those technologies deploy into today's labor institutions, which were designed for the previous century, we'll witness effects similar to recent decades: downward pressure on wages, skills, and benefits, and an increasingly divided labor market." The task force advocates instead for institutional innovations that complement technological change.
4) Enhancing job quality requires innovation in labor market institutions.
The task force maintains that the U.S. needs to modernize labor policies on multiple fronts, including restoring the federal minimum wage to a reasonable percentage of the national median wage and, crucially, indexing it to inflation.
The report also recommends improving unemployment insurance in several ways: using recent earnings to determine eligibility or linking eligibility to hours worked rather than earnings; facilitating partial benefits for situations like losing a secondary job; and eliminating the requirement that individuals must seek full-time work to receive benefits, since many people hold part-time positions.
The report also observes that U.S. collective bargaining laws and processes are outdated. The authors argue that workers need enhanced protection of existing collective bargaining rights; new forms of workplace representation beyond traditional unions; and legal protections enabling groups including home-care workers, farmworkers, and independent contractors to organize.
5) Promoting opportunity and economic mobility requires developing and continuously updating worker skills.
Technological progress may often be incremental, but changes occur frequently enough that workers' skills and career paths can become obsolete. The report emphasizes that U.S. workers need more opportunities to acquire new skills—whether through community colleges, online education, company-based retraining, or other means.
The report calls for making continuous skills development accessible, engaging, and cost-effective. This requires strengthening what already works while advancing new tools: blended online and in-person offerings, machine-supervised learning, and augmented and virtual reality learning environments.
The greatest needs exist among workers without four-year college degrees. "We need to focus on those between high school and a four-year degree," Reynolds states. "There should be pathways for these individuals to enhance their skills and make them meaningful to the labor market. We genuinely need a shift that makes this a high priority."
6) Investing in innovation will stimulate new job creation, accelerate growth, and address rising competitive challenges.
The rate of new-job creation over the past century has been heavily driven by technological innovation, the report notes, with a substantial portion stemming from federal investment in R&D, which has helped produce numerous computing and medical advances, among other developments. As of 2015, the U.S. invested 2.7% of its GDP in R&D, compared to 2.9% in Germany and 2.1% in China. But the public share of that R&D investment has declined from 40% in 1985 to 25% in 2015. The task force calls for renewed commitment to this federal support.
"Innovation plays a crucial role in job creation and growth," Autor emphasizes.
Given innovation's significance to job and wealth creation, the report advocates for increased overall federal research funding; targeted assistance helping small- and medium-sized businesses adopt technology; policies creating a broader geographical distribution of innovation across the U.S.; and policies that enhance investment in workers, not just capital, including eliminating accelerated capital depreciation claims and establishing an employer training tax credit similar to the R&D tax credit.
Global Challenges, U.S. Solutions
Beyond Reynolds, Autor, and Mindell, MIT's Task Force on the Work of the Future comprised 18 MIT professors representing all five Institute schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; a 22-person advisory board featuring industry leaders, former government officials, and academics; a 14-person research board of scholars; and over 20 graduate students. The task force also consulted with business executives, labor leaders, and community college administrators, among others. The final document includes case studies from specific companies and sectors, and the Task Force is publishing nearly two dozen research briefs that explore the primary research in greater detail.
The task force observed global patterns in how technology is adopted and implemented in workplaces, though its recommendations focus on U.S. policy issues.
"While our report primarily addresses U.S. policy concerns, it clearly speaks to numerous trends and issues existing globally," Reynolds notes. "The message isn't solely for the U.S. Many challenges we outline exist in other countries as well, albeit to lesser degrees. As we wrote in the report, 'the central challenge ahead, indeed the work of the future, is to advance labor market opportunity to meet, complement, and shape technological innovations.'"
The task force aims to disseminate ideas from the report among policymakers and politicians, corporate leaders and business managers, researchers, and anyone interested in the state of work in the 21st century.
"I hope people are receptive," Reynolds adds. "We've made forceful recommendations connecting different policy areas—skills, job quality, and innovation. These issues are critical, especially as we consider recovery and rebuilding in the age of Covid-19. I hope our message resonates with both public and private sector leaders, as both are essential to forging the path forward."
