Minimum Wage Increases Could Speed Up Robot Adoption in the U.K.
British government policies to boost income for poorly paying jobs could actually incentivize firms to automate instead.
Economics 101: When human labor costs more, robots look appealing. Higher minimum wages make more businesses consider investment in machines that cost less in the long run. In U.S. manufacturing, a $1 increase in minimum wage drove employment in automatable jobs down a percentage point.
New stats: A report by Britain’s Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says that by 2020, government increases in minimum wage for workers will mean 12 percent of U.K. employees benefit from the policy. That’s triple the number covered by the minimum wage in 2015.
The labor hit: The additional folks receiving minimum wage have jobs highly susceptible to automation, like receptionists and cashiers. The IFS warns that if minimum wages rise further, so 25 percent of workers receive them, many jobs currently too expensive to automate—think office workers—could be taken by machines.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.