Over the last decade, automation has increasingly been adopted as a full substitution of capital for labour—as opposed to a standard form of labour-augmenting technological change. Figure 1 illustrates this trend, charting the stock of operative industrial robots worldwide over time, based on International Federation of Robotics data (IFR 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). The number of industrial robots increased by factor of three over the course of a decade, rising from a little over one million operative units in 2010 to a projected 3.15 million units in 2020. Over the same time, robots reportedly became capable of substituting for, […]
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