If the authors of a recent report could impress just one thing upon you, it would be this: Automation — like so many other economic trends — won’t occur in the same way everywhere.
A recent study embarked upon by the Brookings Institute looks to explore the concentration of robots in U.S. workplaces – not just by industry, but also by region. As for the results? Well, some are surprising, and some not.
Economists used data compiled by International Federation of Robotics (IFR) that looked specifically at industrial robots, and found some interesting trends. For one, industrial robots tend to be densely clustered in certain areas, but not very apparent at all in others.
The Midwest and the South are home to the most significant numbers of our machined friends, a point Brookings attributes to the fact that the auto industry is most prevalent there. It seems the auto industry employs about half of the industrial robots in use currently, in applications like welding, painting and assembly. In fact, ten Midwestern states account for about half of all industrial robots used in the United States, whereas the entire west region only represents 13 percent.
And while it might seem intuitive – there’s just more manufacturing in the Midwest, plain and simple, the ratio of robots to workers is actually skewed as well: Toledo, OH has 9 robots for every thousand workers, and Detroit/Dearborn has 8.5 – and Kokomo, IN has 35 – whereas many west coast cities have fewer than one robot per thousand workers.
The Brookings authors say that, just like the impacts of robotics will vary, so will the anxiety surrounding their possibilities. They suggest that robot anxiety might “max out” in the Midwest, particularly in areas like Michigan and Indiana where their use has become much more prolific.
The study is meant to foreshadow a future report where Brookings looks to delve into ways in which automation is the most disruptive, along with identifying which specific occupations or skills are most susceptible to being displaced by a robotic counterpart.