With the arrival of the “second machine age,” the destruction of many jobs is a given, even if the scope of the transformation is still up for debate. According to some estimates, digital automation puts up to 47 percent of all US employment at “high risk” of vanishing. In the retail sector alone, this translates into 7.5 million jobs out of a total of 16 million. Other estimates that focus on tasks instead of occupations present a much smaller figure of 9 percent of jobs at risk of disappearing. Looking at historical data instead of predictions reveals that adding one robot to a workforce of one thousand human workers has increased unemployment and reduced wages, even if the shifts are very small thus far.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 240