Perhaps this is why people have been slow to think about the potential geographic impact of technological progress. If everyone is going to be affected, then everywhere will surely be too. Yet previous waves of disruption have not swept across countries indiscriminately. They have been shaped by the contours of the economic landscape. Will things really be different this time? A growing body of research suggests the geographic impact of the new machine age will, in fact, be deeply uneven.
A paper published this week by the OECD, the Paris-based club of mostly rich nations, says the distribution of jobs at high risk of automation varies sharply. In general, northern Europe, North America and New Zealand are at much less risk than southern and eastern Europe. In west Slovakia, almost 40 per cent of jobs are at risk, while in the region around Oslo in Norway, the proportion is about 4 per cent. Some countries, but not all, have wide disparities within their own borders.
In Spain, for example, the gap between the most and least exposed regions is 12 percentage points. In Canada, the gap is just 1 percentage point. As should be clear from these findings, the OECD does not believe everyone’s jobs are equally exposed to automation. Its calculations are based on an assumption that some tasks remain beyond the capability of robots and algorithms: creative intelligence, social intelligence and some types of nimble and unstructured physical activities. By examining the tasks that people do in different occupations, the OECD has concluded that jobs that require high levels of education mostly remain safe, while jobs that require only basic education (with some exceptions like social care) are much more exposed than in previous waves of automation. In geographic terms, that is a worry because local jobs markets are not as diverse as they used to be. Read teh full article on FT
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